If you have lemons, you make lemonade, and if you have honey, you make mead, and if you have Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc grapevines in soil so rich and sweet that you could almost eat it with a little salt, you make Chateau d’Yquem. And if you have apples, you make cider—and so the people do in Asturias, in northern Spain. Apple trees grow prolifically on the rolling green hills here, many stubby as shrubs, others as large and ragged as oaks. Many grow randomly, as scattered as the sheep and cows, while other property owners tend checkerboard orchards of trees. Just about every household has several, and behind many a roadside bar—usually subheaded as a “sidreria”—grow trees used to make the house apple cider, which is often served from the spigot of a barrel.
Cider is a thirst quencher here, and it’s a way of life. In the fall, thousands of people participate in the harvest, sending the fruit to about two dozen local commercial producers (many other unregistered sellers bottle cider at home) where the fruit is crushed, the juice fermented and the drink eventually released in wine-sized bottles. Essentially every bar and restaurant in the area serves cider, and here is where one must go to experience cider as Asturians do—and to experience what a lot of fuss Asturian bartenders and patrons put up with for a bottle of some local farmhouse tipple. The bartender makes a grand show of popping the cork and pouring the cider from overhead into a glass held at waist level. The first splashes generally miss and hit the floor before he finds the stream. He fills the glass only about a quarter full, and the recipient must be standing by to drink immediately, to enjoy the bubbles created by the aeration (the cider here is not carbonated). The customary fashion is then to dump out the last splash, a gesture that supposedly freshens the glass for the next person (the presumption is that people are sharing glasses). Want more cider? Somebody, if not the bartender, must go through the pomp and circumstance again, often in a designated corner of the bar, and by the end of a 750-milliliter bottle, about a third has been
spilled. I can only presume Asturian bartenders don’t wear their best shoes to work. Relax over a beer, then get back to work with another splash-dance of cider.
Asturias cider is protected by a Denomination of Origin status, the European Union system of guidelines that lays out laws for the making of regional products like cheese, wine, beer and breads. For cider to wear the proud name of Asturias on its bottle, it can be made using only 22 certain varieties of apples, though more than 250 grow in the region. Most producers use an unspecified mélange of apples, generally five or six varieties, and the wide range of possibilities allows for a great diversity in Asturian cider—though to some degree it’s all roughly the same: usually dry and a bit tart, about 6 percent alcohol by volume, with smells and flavors suggestive of hay and barnyard. Called sidra natural, it’s still as a swamp, and about as green and cloudy, too. It’s also delicious.
