I remember being sat at the kitchen table with my dad, trying to think what to call cider like this – cider of a provenance and quality more familiar from wine, than the industrial thing we have come to know – in the end, we settled on 'Fine Cider', and now 10 years later we have the surreal joy of supplying so many brilliant restaurants, shops, pubs and bars, right across the country; including legends like St John and The Fat Duck; the joy of helping found The London Cider House, at Borough Market, of organising the London Cider Salon at the Tate Modern; and the joy of supplying these beautiful creations, these incredible bottles, to countless people all over the country; most of whom we never get a chance to meet.
We specialise mainly in fine British ciders & perries; exquisite bottles sourced from different corners of the country, & made by some of the best cider makers on the planet. They have not travelled far - this is not wine shipped from a different hemisphere - & are in so many ways, as John Evelyn said, ‘the native English wine’. Or as Laurie Lee put it, the ‘wine of wild orchards’, being the creation of our countryside, & the fruit of our summer.
Because cider has become a very industrial and misunderstood thing: for a drink to be called cider in Britain today, it needs only contain 35% apple concentrate, the rest can be water. Yet a renaissance is underway; a return to refined, small batch making, centring on provenance, and cherishing the orchard. And it’s not just the skill this new wave of makers have, or the variety of styles and sheer quality of what they make that is to be valued, it’s the orchards they support.
Orchards are undervalued, from the carbon sink they provide, to the unique biodiversity they support when managed well; they are the last stronghold of red list species like the lesser spotted woodpecker. Not only is this renaissance, this return of refined cider, a chance for each of us to have better cider to drink, more variety and depth of flavour, it’s a chance to value our countryside, our orchards, and the incredible creations that can be made when people work with nature.
As J.M. Trowbridge, of New York, said in 1890: “Good cider is a much greater rarity than good wine”. This is still true today, & as our customers know, good cider is also often better value than good wine, yet no less varied, complex, fascinating, and expressionate of the terroir from which it comes.
Felix Nash
Founder of The Fine Cider Company
Join us, and over 25 of the countries best cider makers, at the Tate Modern in London, on Saturday the 30th of September 2023 for The London Cider Salon:
There will be getting on for 100 different bottles there for you to try, each poured for you by the maker themselves. Tickets cost £30, and there's a 25% discount for Tate Members, and our wholesale customers (contact us for details).
A Financial Times article by Alice Lascelles: CLICK HERE to read it!
You can find all ciders mentioned in the article in Our Traditional Method Selection.
An article in the Guardian, by the brilliant wine writer Fiona Beckett, about the cider revolution, & why if you aren't already, you should be drinking these ciders!
CLICK HERE to read it!
In an industry that has in many ways remained unchanged for so long, sometimes a new perspective is needed. Sometimes, you need a complete outsider to come in and crash the party to show you how you could do things differently—and, indeed, better.
Enter Felix Nash, someone with no background in the drinks industry—or any kind of industry for that matter—but armed with an insatiable curiosity, boundless enthusiasm, and multiple revelations of under-the-radar ciders and perries from his roots in Herefordshire and Somerset.
An article in the FT by the wonderful Alice Lascelles bout the cider revolution, & why fine ciders are the talk of the town...!
First things first, are you of legal drinking age?
No, but I'm working on it