I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing what ice cider is. Most don’t. It’s ok. It is an infinitesimally small part of a very small portion of global cider production. If you compare it to volumes of grape wine produced annually it is even more non-existent.
In addition it’s much closer to a wine in terms of how it’s made, consumed and presents itself than what most people think of as cider. It straddles several definitions making potentially more difficult to explain.
An attempt at an understanding starts with an explanation of how sweet wines are produced in more general terms.
In a dry wine the winemaker picks the fruit, extracts the juice of that fruit at some stage and uses yeast to convert all, or most, of the sugar of the juice to alcohol.
If you want to produce a wine that has a clear sensation of sweetness, in effect save some of the natural sugar in the wine in a way that makes it one of the main organoleptic components of that wine, you need to find a way to both produce alcohol aided by yeast as well as retain some of the sugar of the juice unfermented in the finished wine.
To get there you need start fermentation at a higher sugar level than you would normally to make a dry wine. That enables the yeast to convert sugar to alcohol leaving residual sugar in the finished wine after fermentation.
So how do you raise the natural sugar in the juice? There are a number of methods, most of them based on removing water from the fruit or the juice from which the wine is derived using climatological factors in the wine maker’s natural environment.
For most sweet grape wines that is done before pressing the grapes, mostly through different forms of natural evaporation.
The sugar in a grape is a solid dissolved in the water in the berry. If a grape is subjected to heat or other dehydrating factors water evaporates making the remaining liquid sweeter because the same amount of sugar (that does not evaporate together with the water) needs to stay dissolved in a smaller amount of water. That makes the juice remaining in the grape sweeter than the juice before water evaporated from it… (continued).
– Andreas Sundgren
For the full text, visit Substack.
Eve’s note: I took this essay from their Instagram: @BrannlandCider and the photo from their Facebook page.
