Harvest is often seen as a magical time of abundance, but for the agricultural workers whose labour is tied so closely with that of their orchards, the run up to harvest can be an anxious time. Without apples to harvest there would be no cider to drink or sell. Consequently, there is no income—a travesty for both maker and consumer.
Part of this anxious magic is that no two harvests are the same; vintages exist in order to help categorise a fruit and their juice by the year they were grown. So what elements are at work to make one harvest differ to another? Is there such a thing as a good and a bad harvest? What is needed to make a harvest one of abundance over anxiety?
A wine and cider writer, featured in Wine52’s Glug magazine, Pellicle magazine, Burum Collective and Two Belly. The mind behind wine newsletter J’adore le Plonk and an untiring advocate for spritzing every drink she can get her hands on.
Deciding where to plant an orchard is not dissimilar to deciding where to place a house plant in your living room. Will there be enough sun? How often is it going to get disturbed by pests? Will it get the warmth that it needs to flourish?
Orchard placement is a whole topic in itself, but for now let’s just say that orchards that have been cared for – not overwhelmed with chemicals and receive a generous amount of warmth, sunlight and water. This lends itself to a greater chance of success.
When I asked Bill Bleasdale of Welsh Mountain Cider about what constituted a good harvest. It is with the trees that his answer began:
“Lovely big old gnarly trees in old, unsprayed extensive orchards give tastier more complex fruit and cider than bush fruit grown intensively in glyphosated [chemicalised herbicide] orchards,” he tells me.
So if the trees themselves haven’t been given a second thought, then chances are the cider will taste just as lacking. Exactly like the drooping, shrivelled up fern forgotten about in the corner of an office.
It may be hard to picture, but winter is a magical time in cider making. The cold, festive months work as a handover period between vintages; as the juice from the summer begins its journey towards fermentation, the trees in the orchard slowly regroup in preparation to bear fruit again. Slow and steady is the theme of these months as a baton is passed from one vintage to the other.
But, as Lydia Crimp—cider maker extraordinaire at Artistraw—explains, these slow cold months aren’t quite that straightforward:
“We rely on cold winter temperatures to regulate and ensure a slow, gentle fermentation for our natural ciders; something that with climate change is becoming harder to expect,” Lydia explains.
Climate change isn’t just behind blisteringly hot summers, it’s also causing wild inconsistency in temperatures and unpredictable swings in conditions, not what you need when praying for a soft, slow winter. As climate change becomes more present, the power it has in dictating whether a harvest is good or bad yields stronger and a cider maker’s yearly crop becomes harder to predict in the process.
As orchards begin to awaken with the arrival of spring, timing is of the essence.
“Early in the year when the risk of frost still looms large, we spend any unseasonably warm days pleading with the closed buds on the trees to stay tucked up, for fear that the cold will steal the fruit before it’s even had a chance to set,” Lydia tells me.
And it’s not just the bite of frost that growers are wary of. Pollination is vital at this time and a happy, healthy orchard is expected to be buzzing with life with pollinating insects, but again, only if the weather behaves itself.
“Wet and windy weather can stop pollinating insects getting into the trees while in blossom,” explains Bill, adding two more weather conditions to the list of variants growers need to be concerned about during the spring.
So, for a textbook spring to occur in an orchard, no frost damage would have occurred to the blossoming trees, pollinating insects will then have been warmly welcomed into the orchards so they can pollinate away and a good balance of rain and sunshine will have gently encouraged the fruit to begin to grow.
As the fruit set begins not only are the apples required to grow in vast quantities, they also need to develop the right characteristics. Sugar is required in order for yeast to convert it into alcohol during fermentation and acid is needed to aid a cider’s flavour and balance out those tannins. So how does weather affect those two factors?
“Quite simply, the more sunny days, the more sugar the apples will have and the greater potential for higher alcohol levels in the cider.” Lydia tells me. “Conversely there is also evidence to suggest that acidity levels decrease in higher levels of sunshine which is one of the many challenges we face with climate change as fresh juice with low acidity levels is far more susceptible to infection during fermentation.”
A real balancing act is required then—are you spotting a theme yet? For a good harvest there needs to be enough sunshine to make sugar and enough rain to ensure the apples aren’t too overcome by heat, losing their acidity in the process. So much of a year’s harvest is down to elements out of a cider maker’s control, their role is to work alongside the weather and the fruit, not the other way around.
Once the fruit has successfully set then a big dose of late summer sunshine is hoped for in the weeks before picking to really get the fruit ripe and ready for picking. And then before you know it, harvest has arrived!
When so much of an apple’s growth is down to the weather conditions, it should be no surprise by now that it is up to Mother Nature, not Cider Makers, to determine when harvest time is here. But there is still some autonomy over when picking begins:
“We like to leave off harvesting the fruit ’til the last possible moment so that it’s at its sweetest and most flavourful,” Bill says. “We [then] press mostly outside. We’ve often chipped ice off the press bed but we can’t press in the rain because we don’t want our precious juice diluted.”
At Artistraw they, too, hope for no rain during harvest.
“A dry(ish) October and November for ease of harvest—no mud equals cleaner fruit, fewer slugs, less stuck vehicles, happy apple pickers.” Lydia lists off. “All finished off with a final pressing day around the first week in December.”
And then, my friends, we are back to wishing for a slow and steady cold winter so we can go all over again!
There are, of course, elements outside of the weather that dictate the success of a harvest, the ability to be versatile with the fruit Mother Nature has gifted you (and others) is vital to a successful harvest, as Tom Oliver of Oliver’s Cider and Perry explains:
“Having a view as to what you will be wanting to make in terms of quantity and characteristics and making sure you will have enough of the right fruit for the job will be part of the approach to harvest,” Tom explains to me. “If you live and die by your own fruit, so be it, we don’t and I like to keep in touch with all partner orchardists and growers, to try and determine where we are for fruit and then I can agree what we are taking for the season.”
The taking of the fruit is when it will vary from grower to maker across the country. For some, harvest is a time of people and of hands, as many as possible to get involved in the picking. For this you’ll need a reliable, good natured team who aren’t afraid of the elements.
The use of machines in harvest is a choice made dependent on the land that is being harvested, the amount of trees that need attending to and the money available to pay for people to pick. Healthy equipment is key here.
“A large pot of gold, adequate reserves or an understanding bank,” as Tom Oliver dryly tells me, is also of some use, too.
…Tom says when I ask him. “If you feel that you did all you could in advance, that you responded well under adversity during harvest and you put together some good “harvest blends” as the fruit came in and you were finished and cleaned up and put away by Christmas, then that is a good harvest.”
Hopefully by now you can appreciate that there is a lot at play when it comes to the success of a year’s harvest, a success which starts, not in the days during picking, but in the months and years before as the trees are planted and as the earth too takes its journey around the sun. Months and years you’ll be able to appreciate when you next pick up a glass, and get to taste all that has gone into it.
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