Sunday Drinking: 21 May

This Sunday I’m drinking a magnificent cider that harks back to the drink’s golden age… whenever that was.

I’m in a particularly good mood at the moment as I’ve just had a quote in for my forthcoming book from Russell Norman:

“Captivating, impeccably researched and endlessly entertaining. Henry Jeffreys embraces his subject like a scholar but with wry humour and a novelist’s knack for storytelling. It’s the best book on wine I have read.”

Phew! For readers who don’t know that name he’s a restaurant industry stalwart, the man behind Polpo and now Brutto in Farringdon, and sometime TV presenter. But he’s also a wonderful writer. His Polpo: A Venetian Cookbook (of sorts) is a hymn to the food of Venice. I should say that I know Norman a little. I worked on his books when I was at Bloomsbury publishing and we both used to live in Blackheath. Still, I don’t think he’s a man who would say something he doesn’t mean. So yes, very very pleased.

Right, enough of the trumpet blowing. This Sunday I wanted to highlight a particularly delicious new cider called Showering Triple Vintage. The name Showering might well be familiar to British readers of a certain age because they were the family who created Babycham. For me it conjures up that advert from the 1980s where the Sloaney lady says: “I’d love a Babycham” in a trendy nightclub. The whole place goes quiet until a very cool black man says “Hey! I’d love a Babycham” and then everyone is clamouring for one. As you can imagine that catchphrase did the rounds at our school for years in various forms.

Babycham was created in 1953 by Francis Showering and it’s a sparkling perry ie. made from pears. As something sweet, simple and not too alcoholic (6%),  it functioned as a sort of proto-alcopop for many years. It’s heyday was in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It was served in little mini coupe glasses emblazoned with the Babycham fawn. We have a couple at home that my wife likes to drink champagne out of. According to Wikipedia: “At the peak in June 1973 144,000 bottles were being produced each hour.”  By the ‘80s, however, it was decidedly not hip, as you may have guessed from the advert. By then the Showerings family had sold up to Allied Breweries.

But the family’s association with drink didn’t end there as in 1992 the next generation founded Brothers Cider. I remember it being ubiquitous as festivals in the 00s and as such I drank a lot of it though I couldn't tell you much more about it apart from it went well with whatever else I was doing at festivals in the early 00s. The latest release, however, is aimed a little higher, at Michelin-starred restaurants. In fact, I was invited to have lunch with Nick Showering at Zephyr in Notting Hill - apparently a fancy restaurant. 

It’s called Triple Vintage and as its name suggests, it’s a blend of three years 17,18 and 2021 and made mainly from the dabinett apple variety. Unlike more commercial ciders which get much of their alcohol from sugar, it’s made entirely from apples. I didn’t go for that lunch, but they sent me a sample and it’s absolutely delicious, lightly carbonated, with lots of rich cooked apple fruit, a bittersweet seville orange edge, and a real depth of flavour. When I talked about it with a cider expert friend he said that marmalade note is typical of dabinett. For me it bridges the gap between serious West Country ciders which can be very tannic and a bit demanding to the uninitiated, and simpler but still good quality ones like Westons. It will definitely appeal to people who love French cider but wouldn’t touch the English stuff with a bargepole. 

English cider  was once held in high regard but (some of) the big cider companies systematically destroyed the quality of their products in order to compete with beer. I wrote about it in the Spectator a few years back:

After the second world war, large-scale cider-makers in the West Country began lowering the amount of fruit in their products, specifically characterful bittersweet cider apples, and making up the rest with dessert apples and sugar. Quality plummeted. In his fascinating book Cider Country, James Crowden writes: ‘Bertram Bulmer once declared, in strict confidence, that you would not “catch him drinking any of his own products”.’

All this was done in the utmost secrecy. Crowden mentions a sinister conversation which Andrew Lea from the Long Ashton Research Station had with the technical director at Bulmers about changes to the company’s cider: ‘You must never mention these things to me again. Never talk about these things. These things are closed. They are secret. You must not tell anybody else what actually goes in cider.’ Blimey, it’s like something from the X Files.

The big cider-makers were applying a beer mentality to their products but, as Lea puts it, ‘cider works better when it is viewed as a wine’. The nadir came with the arrival of ‘white ciders’ in the 1980s, some of which were made from less than 7 per cent apples. ‘Cider has become little more than an alcopop,’ as Crowden puts it.

Showering Triple Vintage shows what English cider is capable of when producers treat the raw materials like wine rather than cheap lager and with the marketing of a large company behind it, it deserves to do very well. But perhaps the best thing about it is the price, £4 for a half bottle. Which is crazy. You’ll never find a sparkling wine as nice for £8. I’d buy cases of the stuff for the summer and serve it in little Babycham coupes instead of prosecco.