Blurred Lines

Foraged fruit at Art+Science Cider and Wine / Photo courtesy Kim Hamblin

There’s a growing segment in the world of delicious ferments, and apples are just the canvas. Let’s dive into the explosion of flavors coming from cider-focused co-ferments.

WORDS Alexander Peartree

When apple juice is fermented, you get cider. When pear juice is fermented, you get perry. Honey ferments into mead; rice into sake. Grapes turn into wine and malt transforms into beer. But what do you call a beverage that is made up of apples, grapes, plums and cherries all fermented together?

This mishmashed category of ferments doesn’t really have a set name, and producers of the stuff pride themselves on coloring outside the lines. Some refer to them as co-ferments (cofos for short), which indicates a beverage made up of more than one fermentable thing (fruit, vegetable, flower or grain) that’s fermented together.­ Some think the term rolling ferments is more accurate, as the mix of ingredients may be added at different times throughout the whole fermentation process, and thus not all the ingredients are fermenting in unison. Some call them fruit pét-nats, short for pétillant naturels, to align the drinks with the booming natural wine scene.

In the U.S., according to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), co-ferments are technically fruit wine, which is a broad term that includes wine made from any non-grape fruit or one that includes a mix of grapes and non-grapes.

If the term fruit wine is giving you a fruit-bomb sugar headache, or channeling visions of Moira Rose puckering from sips of Herb Ertlinger’s varied fruit-based selections, you’re not alone. There’s a reason most producers of dry-styled co-ferments don’t use the term, which further demonstrates how this segment of the beverage world is setting itself apart.

Whatever moniker they may use, the thing that can be agreed upon­ is that producers of co-ferments utilize­ a spectrum of ingredients to create boundary-pushing drinks that emphasize­ deliciousness, resourcefulness and experimentation over a necessity to be categorized.

A TANGLED PAST

Fermenting two different things together­ isn’t new. For grape wine, the tradition dates back to the early days of viticulture when vineyards were planted indiscriminately to different varieties. Dark-colored grapes, light-colored grapes, it didn’t matter. They were all harvested together, fermented together and made into wine.

These field blends, as they are known nowadays, have largely been pushed to the wayside in favor of single-variety sections of specified vineyard origin that are harvested at each grape’s optimal ripeness and fermented separately. Certainly, however, there are traditional outliers that still exist today, such as Austria’s Gemischter Satz, edelzwicker in Alsace, France, and the fortified Port wines of Portugal, as well as a handful of producers making field blends in California.

While co-fermentation of red and white grapes was the foundation of notable­ wine regions like Chianti in Italy and Côte-Rôtie in France, the grapes were typically not interplanted. The former is known for its Sangiovese-based red wines, which in the past included white grapes Trebbiano and Malvasia, and is still allowed for up to 10 percent today. The latter is known for its Syrah-based red wines, which to this day can include up to 20 percent of a co-ferment of the white grape Viognier. In both instances, the general idea behind­ the co-ferment was to soften the burly tannins from the red grapes and elevate aromatics of the overall wine by adding white grapes.

But that’s just one fruit: grapes. The current oldest discovered evidence of a fermented beverage comes from as early as 7000 B.C.E. in China, which was made from a mix of rice, honey, hawthorn fruit and/or grapes according to a 2004 report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) peer-reviewed journal. This ancient cofo is a great example of the resourcefulness employed by fermentation experimenters—use what’s around you.

WORKING WITH WHAT YOU GOT

Fermenting a bunch of things in some tangled manner is currently blowing up in the beverage world, and, for the most part, it seems like cidermakers are among the early experimenters and adopters of the cofo movement.

“I think they are interesting to make on the production side—people enjoy making them,” says Dan Pucci, co-author of American Cider: A Modern Guide to a Historic Beverage and publisher of Malus, when asked about the growing presence of co-ferments.

Art+Science in nature / Courtesy Kim Hamblin

There’s also a practical side to it. “In the fruit world, when you have fruit, you have so much volume produced,” says Pucci. “So co-ferments are a good use of infrastructure and existing resources­… It’s not like apples where excess­ crop can be stored and held onto and retains value over the course of a period of time. But your excess peach crop [for instance] doesn’t have extra value to it. It’s either going to get sold or it’s going to get wasted.”

In Ontario, Canada, Revel Cider has been making co-ferments since it began a decade ago. Founder Tariq Ahmed works entirely with ingredients from the province, some farmed and some foraged, his inspiration a sense of holistic terroir.

Recalling a time when attending wine courses in his early career, he says “you get handed a glass of Pinot Noir, and they’ll be like, this represents a time and a place and a region. But that never rang true for me because you ignored­ 99 percent of the biodiversity in your area and you’re telling me this is a reflection of your area?”

Revel Cider Soif / Drea Scotland

Rinke recalls a prior experiment where he co-fermented two grapes, Blaufränkisch and Grüner Veltliner, to make a “Côte-Rôtie-inspired Austrian grape ferment.” The final result was a rosé which, in his words, “ended up being way more tannic than either the Grüner or the Blaufränkisch [alone], and so the conclusion was that it came from the Grüner skins.”

From there, in 2015, they put the puzzle pieces together and created Art+Science’s first cofo, Symbiosis, a 50-50 co-fermentation of Grüner Veltliner and apples, with the wine-grape part giving texture, depth and complementary flavor to the juicy fruitiness of the apples.

While they also make single-fruited wines and ciders, their line of co-ferments has also expanded. They utilize a mix of foraged and farmed fruit from Oregon to make a range of co-ferments, including their most popular selection, FruitNat, a blend of pears, apples, plums and the wine grape Mondeuse Noire.

Tariq Ahmed of Revel Cider / Chloë Ellingson

FLAVORS TO MEET THE PEOPLE

If consumers were presented with an apple, grape and cherry co-­ferment over a decade ago, it’s likely that nine times out of 10, they would turn it down. But in the current beverage culture, things are shifting and that’s certainly in part due to the natural wine movement.

Consumers are increasingly­ becoming­ aware of sourcing and concerned with the ingredients in the bottle.­ With wine in particular, they are catching on that many large-­production operations add anything from coloring to tannins to excess amounts of the preservative sulfur­ di­oxide—all without needing to list them as ingredients on the label.

While it hasn’t been shown that any of these additives are inherently harmful to consume (at least in the doses that are in the bottle), the natural wine movement purports minimal to no additions and transparency of ingredients,­ with many producers often­ listing them out: fruit, yeast, sulfites (if added).

This philosophy has resonated­ with many cider-focused co-­fermenters who have thought of using different fruits to bring added dimension and depth to a product without the need of additives. Need more tannin? Add in cherries with their pits. Looking for a touch of sweetness to round out the ferment? Add in some pears, which have an unfermentable sugar called sorbitol. Need a slightly herbal astringency­ to cut some fruity intensity? Look to Cabernet Franc skins to impart that.

This segment of producers has always been resourceful, recognizing the utility of what’s around them and transforming that arsenal of ingredients­ into deliciously complex ferments.

“I think all fruit should have the same reverence,” says Rinke. “Fruits are all basically the same thing. They are sugar, they are acids. That’s basically­ it.”