Made by: La Cidrerie du Golfe

Made in: Arradon, Brittany

Style: Medium Sweet

ABV: 5.5%

Carbonation: Light to medium

Bought: Good Spirits Co. Wine & Beer, Glasgow

Price: £13 (750ml bottle)

Producer’s website: La Cidrerie du Golfe

Suckered again. Having innocently commented on Twitter that I really enjoyed a certain perry from Ross On Wye that I’d bought at The Good Spirits Company, I got a quick as a flash response asking if I wanted them to put ‘the last bottle’ aside for me. Being polite and thirsty, I promptly took them up on the offer, knowing fine well that there was no chance I’d be able to visit my favourite cider store without picking up another half dozen bottles while I was there to collect my perry.

One of the bottles that caught my eye was a cider from a producer I’d never heard of before: La Cidrerie du Golfe from Brittany. Roddy and the team at the store do an amazing job of sourcing ciders that fit Roddy’s demanding criteria which broadly translates as: proper cider and reasonably rare. Roddy, as I have been discovering over the last six months or so, is a man of exquisite tastes as well as being a properly lovely bloke.

He’s also pretty hot on his cider. In fact, when I was in getting my latest haul he was busy spending a week in Herefordshire hard at work with his pals James and Susanna Forbes at Little Pomona, no doubt creating some more cidery gems to be oo’d and ah’d over in the future.

Anyway, Hors Norme. It’s made by Cidrerie du Golfe which has one of those wonderfully dreadful websites that manages to be purposefully ugly while also conveying virtually no information of any value. And it’s all in French, which is fair enough I suppose as it’s a French company.

[Aside: It’s a curious quirk of the proper cider community that shite and painfully out of date websites are, apparently, de rigeur. There are of course some exceptions to that farcical generalisation but the general rule seems to hold that the better and more polished the website, the worse and less polished the cider. Discuss].

So, what I gleaned from the Cidrerie du Golfe website is as follows. It makes eight ciders in Arradon in Brittany. One of them is Hors Norme, roughly translated as ‘out of the ordinary’. Hors Norme, says the painfully concise website, is “amer et long en bouche”, or bitter and long in the mouth.

The bottle label adds that the cider is made to organic certification standards without the addition of sulphites. And that’s pretty much that.

If it wasn’t for my faith in Roddy’s selection process it’s debatable whether I’d have picked this one up, but here goes.

TASTING NOTES, AFTER A FASHION:

Slightly cloudy and a pale golden amber, the carbonation is reasonably aggressive, as is often the case with French ciders.

The aroma is enchanting and again very typical of Brittany. Rich, sharp and full with lots of pungent rough, thick apple skins, some slight musty notes and a big waft of lightly burnt toffee, maybe some oak and a bit of spice. Lush.

On the palate it’s everything you’d expect but with a twist. That bitterness the website refers to is right in your face from the outset and, somehow, it just works really well when layered over the toffee apple, tangy vanilla sweetness. It’s almost certainly keeved (although I couldn’t officially confirm that) which gives it that rich, deep, heavy sweetness and notes of over-ripe apple. It’s certainly not overpoweringly sweet and the bitterness does a grand job of keeping the sweetness in check and in more or less in balance.

Somewhat off-pissingly, there’s also a very specific and unexpected flavour that lands with a plop in the mid palate but for the life of me I can’t give it a name. It’ll come to me at 3am one morning, no doubt.

Anyway, the longer you slosh the liquid around in your mouth the more the bitterness takes over along with some chunky tannins that get chewier and grippier towards a much more pronounced oaky finish.

All told, it’s a lovely, well made cider typical of the region but with a refreshing bitter twist that lifts it and gives it an added dimension and depth. Easy to drink, easy to enjoy, it just works.

4️⃣/5️⃣