Natural cider

Natural cider — cidre traditionnel in French, cider or farmhouse cider in English usage — is apple juice fermented to alcohol by the wild yeasts that live on the apple skin. There is no added yeast, no added sugar, no added sulfites in the most traditional preparation. The result is dry (most cider apples have so much sugar that nearly all of it ferments out), tart, complex, often sparkling, and 4-8% ABV typical.

The critical variable is the apples. Eating apples (the supermarket varieties bred for sweetness and crunch) make a flat, one-dimensional cider — too sweet, too low in acid, too low in tannin. Cider apples are a different category of fruit: smaller, often too astringent to eat, bred specifically for high tannin and high acid. Traditional French cider apple varieties (Frequin Rouge, Bedan, Binet Rouge, dozens more) come from Normandy and Brittany; English bittersweet varieties (Yarlington Mill, Dabinett, Kingston Black) come from the West Country traditions. A cider made from proper cider apples is structurally different from a cider made from juice apples — denser, more tannic, more interesting.

The fermentation itself is simple by alcohol standards: press the apples, let the wild yeasts ferment the juice, transfer off the lees, age. The complexity comes from variables in apple source, juice extraction, fermentation temperature, and aging vessel. Traditional Normandy cider ferments at cellar temperature (10-14°C) for months; modern fast cider can ferment in 7-10 days at 20°C but tastes meaningfully different.

In the United States, the modern cider revival has split into two camps: 'craft cider' using wild fermentation and proper cider apples (small producers in Vermont, Virginia, the Finger Lakes); and 'commercial cider' using table apple juice + commercial yeast + back-sweetening (the supermarket category). Both call themselves cider; only the first is recognizably the traditional product.