Time to define “cider”
Australia seems to be in the middle of a cider boom. Walk into any big-name liquor store and you’ll find shelves, once packed with bag-in-the-box wines, groaning under the weight of apple and pear cider bottles. One liquor store your correspondent visited on a recent trip to Australia claimed to stock 70 different ciders from all over the globe. Dozens of shiny brands from Australia and New Zealand, from Ireland and Sweden, were jostling for the consumers’ attention, alongside funky French farmhouse cidre and cloudy British scrumpy from the West Country.
How times have changed. A decade ago, it was hard to find any good cider in Australia – especially good imported cider. Now ciders represent 2 percent of total alcohol sales in the off-premise sector, having grown 14 percent per annum over the period 2005 to 2010.
Drinking cider in Australia can turn into an expensive affliction. Rekorderlig from Sweden costs over AUD 80 (EUR 63) per carton of 24 bottles or AUD 10 per pint (EUR 8.0) in a pub. That’s what many Australians would call “expensive” or even a “rip off”, particularly if they knew that in high-excise Sweden a pint of Rekorderlig will only cost them EUR 6.0.
Compare that to the price of a mainstream Australian beer brand: a similar-sized carton of any mainstream beer will set you back less than AUD 40.
Apparently, younger Australian consumers lace their cider with a shot of liqueur or brandy. Many will think this custom vile, unless they know how lacking in flavour many ciders are.
Your correspondent and BRAUWELT International’s Australian reporter John Harvey conducted a cider tasting of twelve randomly purchased domestic and imported ciders last month and here are our findings:
Several sported a colour which was not inviting. Many showed poor noses, especially those which claimed to be pear ciders (or perry, to be precise) and had no pear notes whatsoever. Using a 20 points score, most ciders only achieved 10 points or less. Best performed the aforementioned Rekorderlig cider from Sweden and 5 Seeds Clean Crisp Cider (by Tooheys/Lion) at 16 points each.
What is really annoying is that consumers of cider often aren’t told how the ciders have been made. As there is no Australian legislation defining what actually constitutes cider, we often could not find out from studying the label if the ciders we tasted had been made from crushed apples, or if they had been blended (ahem), using an alcohol base and added flavours.
Rekorderlig, for example, states on the label that the cider “is made from the purest Swedish spring water and is bursting with deliciously ripe summer apple flavours.” It’s a nice product but not what we would have called a cider.
Our personal evaluation suggests that tighter regulations, leading to more informative labelling, could be beneficial for consumers.
For example, it would be good to know the types and sources of juices used: natural juice, concentrated juice or reconstituted juice.
Many orange juice products currently marketed in Australia carry labels which indicate the types and sources of the juices used … similar labelling for cider and perry would certainly be useful.
