Pressing apples & cider making

Apple juice flowing from the press Somewhere near Joigny, Burgundy
When the late-autumn season settles in, with its dark days and bone-freezing, humid temperatures, you can choose to cocoon indoors listening for example to vintage son-montuno music, it works well, it's an exhilarating experience, particularly when the piano solo starts. Another way to fight the winter gloom is to jump in the cold but share a heartening experience with friends, and if some booze plays a role, that could help (I don't mean booze must be in everything you do...). That's what I did this saturday near Joigny on the northern-most tip of Burgundy when I joined early in the morning a group of buddies who make cider together every year, for the fun of it, because the product they get is at the same time very natural and pure, devoid of any hidden additives, and because it's damn cheap (but it doesn't really count compared with the two other reasons). There's no organic-hype connotation or commercial motives in this initiative, just the love of real products and the will to keep the old apple orchards in use.
This frigid, grey and misty weather is ideal, my friend Bruno says, to press the apples, which is the first and most important stage of cider making. And if this region is known to be cold, it's not that it's much colder than, say, Paris, but the humidity of this part of Burgundy (same for Chablis which is 40 km away) makes it feel really cold deep inside.
Pic on left : a wheelbarrow load of Avrolles apples, the variety which counts so much for a great cider.

The mobile press Here is the wonder machine : a mobile fruit press pulled at will behind a big tractor. This is a more sophisticated version compared to the single-unit mobile apple presses that you may see elsewhere mounted behind a tractor (like this one), and which are powered by the tractor's engine. The large one on the picture above is operated by Raymonde and Gerard, who own this service company and who are based in their farm in the vicinity of Joigny. Raymonde and Gerard have been scouring the region since october doing this job, and this particular pressing session was the last of the season (except another last one for themselves with their own apples). They came here on appointment, like they did with all their customers who have previously gathered all the apples they intended to press. They're doing that for a living, charging 22 Euro-cents for a liter, this include their own workforce and the mobile press use. While some may have just in mind to make their own apple juice and stock it for winter, it is obvious that the majority intends to make some fermented juice with it, cider and also ratafia, which I drank that day and which is made mixing apple juice and marc. Claire and Olivier As Claire is leaving to go buy food on the saturday market in Toucy, Olivier is in charge of keeping the lower apple tank full, so that the fruit elevator keeps busy when the machine needs apples to crush. Big bags are repeatedly emptied into this tank, which is also full of water so that the apples get washed.
The 4 buddies, Olivier, Bruno, Jean-Claude and Damien, bought 1,6 metric ton of apples for this pressing operation, like they've been doing for years now. They paid 5 Euro-cents a kilo for these apples, which they sourced among farmers of the vicinity who don't have a use for their apples. They look for different orchard owners, checking the varieties' qualities. You can see apples of different colors and aspect, this is because they bought several well-selected varieties which grow locally, and are known to make good ciders. The one on the left is quite big; To my opinion they could be eaten like that as well, even if the taste is a bit more pronounced than table varieties. Plus, the above-average acidity makes these apples easy to stock during the winter, giving the wise appple-lover a steady supply of vitamins.
With all this juice, they will fill 4 casks plus a good number of smaller containers, which will make them a good stock of excellent cider with no fuzzy approach in the manufacturing like in the industrial ciders you find in the shops.
I first tasted their cider during a harvest in Gerard's vineyard near Joigny, and this 2-year artisanal cider was a wonderful discovery, especially when Bruno told me that he had made this stuff by himself and except for a spoon of sugar before bottling, there was no other additive, preservative or color manipulation.
Loading bags of apples Jean-Claude is emptying bagloads of apples in the tank, trying as much as possible to keep the apples mixed, as the juice fills cask after cask, this way the 4 casks will be filled with roughly the same blend of apples. The small red apples which you see among others are the ones which Bruno says are very important for the cider : these are Avrolles apples, which are named from a village of the Yonne département which is now part of Saint Florentin. The other apples are from the Sebin variety, the Chataignier variety and the Petit Locard variety. You have to know that this part of northern Burgundy is cider country, and this culture still survives with some orchards here and there, even though there was a much bigger surface of apple trees not so long ago. There is a wide choice of apples fit for cider making, and choosing the varieties for your cider is an Art, as I understand : you have the bitter (amère) apple, the bittersweet (douce amère) apple, the sweet (douce) apple, the acidulous (acidulée) apples, the bitter-and-sour (aigre amère) apple and the sour (aigre) apple, like you can read on this Pdf file about cider apples (in French). This other page lists the apple varieties along with their tasting character. Framing the crushed apples Raymonde and Gerard are servicing the impressive machine which coordinates the crushing of the apples, the filling of theframed bags and the pressing. This is their job and they've been doing operations like this one 150 times at least this season. They have another 3 such press trailers similar to this one at home in case there's a technical problem with this one. When they've an appointment in a farm they drive the trailer with their tractor and stay whatever time is needed to press what's they're asked to, usually it's a day or half a day work. They know most of their clients, many are established farmers who may make cider either for themselves or to sell.
What you see here is the filling of jute bags (I think it's jute) which are kept tight with a wooden frame. Once filled with the right volume, they wrap the crushed apples with the jute sheet, take the frame out, lay another separation board, put the frame back on top and lay open another bag of jute. This way, they pile up a dozen of crushed-apples bags that will be ptessed together. At the end, they're so close from where the crushed apples fall that they have very little room to operate, while at the beginning they need to put a hose to guide the mashed apples (pics on the sides). When they don't put this hose, you can get pieces of crushed apples even at some distance, like I got on my lens a couple of times. On the right, you can see the wrapping of an individual load. The Sambron press This is the Sambron press, it is mounted with a revolving system so that right after the pressing of a pile of bags is completed, you can shift to the second pile which has been supposedly prepared inbetween while the pressing of the first one was going on. See Raymonde on the picture on the right as she checks the revolving operation.

The Sambron company seems to be still running, even though they don't have a website. They're located in Pontchateau in the Muscadet region, and there seems to be another cider-press maker in this village. this press seems very simple to operate and maintain, with its belt drive mechanism and rustic looks.

There will be a total of 1000 liters made this day, actually a bit more but Raymonde and Gerard will not bill the whole volume. The yields vary with the vintage and the conditions of the apples, and Bruno who is now an experienced cider maker (even if officially an amateur one), envisionned yields of 1100 liters for this load of 1,5 or 1,6 tons of apples.

From what he learned in the region this year, there's good volumes of juice from the apples, this depends of the weather and other conditions, a little like for the grapes. But for a given volume of apples, you can have more or less juice, this all depends usually of the vintage, if the apples could store water and keep it until the picking.

Watch here the very beginning of the pressing : on this video you can see the pile of mashed apples when they're about to be pressed. there's no juice at all first going out of the mesh bags, then the press lid begins to weigh heavily on the whole pile and that's when the juice goes out, by drops first, then by streams, virtually a river of apple juice. The cider is on its way... Apple juice on tap The juice is flowing from the press into a small vat, and it is pumped from there into whatever container the customer wants to. In our case, it goes into the casks at the other end of the long hose. I tasted this juice, it is a beauty of a juice, turbid, sugary, vivid and everything, I guess only freshly-pressed apple juice can be so pleasant to drink. The odd thing is that it wasn't even bitter or acidic, even though it was made with supposedly bitter/acidic apples, which are the ones that make the best ciders. I think that acidic apples can yield very civilized juices, the juice feel being very different from what you would experience if you just crunched into intact apples. By the way I ate recently a few of these Avrolles apples which I picked in an orchard of the Pays d'Othe in northern Burgundy when B. and I drove through there recently, and I didn't feel like they were extremely acidic while B. found them really hard to swallow. By the way, this orchard was the very one which was at the center of this story, and we now manage to stop there every year around early november because nobody seems to be picking the apples there. No need to say that I made some healthy stock for winter... The Pays d'Othe which is also known for its vast expanses of forests, is also not far from Joigny and it is known alike for its cider production (map). Expert sorting Like for careful winemaking, you have to check the quality of the raw material if you plan to make cider, and although you need to unload the bags of apples quite fast into the water tank of the press trailer, Damien and Olivier manage to quickly sort apples before turning them to the press, Olivier throwing them straight into the tank. They threw damaged apples into the wheelbarrow on the left, as they may have had a couple of bags which had been picked earlier in the season and where the rot was beginning to turn bad. That's why it's a good thing that the cider season is relatively cold, we may find this weather awful and unpleasant, but it seems to be designed to keep the apples healthy until the pressing stage. Filling the casks You may have been wondering where all this juice was going : The juice is pumped right into these casks, the 4 friends having 4 of them stocked in this house, which belongs to Jean Claude. Two casks are in this surface cellar and the two others are in the barn along the house. Someone has to keep an eye on the filling because with the foam it's not easy to guess the progress of the operation. More than once, the cider overflew, with the foam sticking on the outside. I'm sure that it's not that bad, it helps the natural yeasts of the room communicate with their fellow inside... The cider is going to ferment there till march, from what I understood, and then there will be a bottling with a spoon of sugar so that the fermentation can start again, which will create a high pressure and bubbles in the bottles. You can see aged cider on the left, they use reusable bottles, complete with lightning stoppers like the ones you found in the old days. Speaking of lightning stoppers, read this very well documented page about bottle closures, it's a mine of informations with (excellent) pictures of vintage bottles (designers should find inspiration here). This website is managed by Bill Lindsey, who lives in Klamath Falls, Oregon.
When I first had some cider made by Bruno, it was last october during the family harvest near Joigny (picture of the cider treat at midscroll on this page). The cider was a two-year old unpasteurized cider, so good and far from its peak (is there a peak for ciders too ?), deliciously aromatic with a thin bubble texture in the mouth, and I was puzzled to learn that Bruno had made it himself and that it had gone through such a long élevage. They keep the casks clean with a sulphur wick when they are empty, and like they would do in a winery, they water the casks sometime before the pressing day so that they don't leak.
They also use plastic containers, 20-liter cans and 5-liter jugs, possibly for the future ratafia. Apple carpets Once the pressing over, the cloth around the apple mash is unwrapped and the now-thin, carpet-like cake of apple mash is discarded on the side. It's impressive to see Raymonde and Gerard dropping these big plates of pressed apples on the ground. You can see that in the video at the bottom. The pressed mash looks like a pancake or a thin cheese cake, it's actually kind of appetizing and I'm still wondering why I didn't try to taste a chunk, maybe it was because I was with my camera gear and didn't want to make my hands sticky. One of the guys told me it didn't taste much because all the juice and liquid was gone. They took it away to somewhere near the barn, and it made several wheelbarrow loads. I'm not sure what they do with this, maybe some compost, but they don't distill it, I'm quite sure. Souvenir portrait This is over, and before Raymond and Gerard rush to their farm pulling their press trailer after cleaning it with the hose, I manage to have a picture of the party.

Each of them now has a 220-liter cask of cider in the making, plus a few containers for ratafia and for apple juice to give to their children, this all for a very reasonable price especially if you consider the authenticity of the product (each of them will pay a total of 80 to 100 € for about 300 liters of juice, really nothing when you know the price in specialized shops for additives-free artisan cider (or juice).

As said above, the juice will ferment quietly during a month in the barrels, after which they'll close the hole tight with a bung to prevent any air from sneaking inside. After this stage of 3 months, they'll bottle the wine, in march, on a clear day, preferably with wind coming from the west (the old cider makers used to say : no mist or fog).
This is a day I won't forget, I met very nice people, the ones you see here plus others later in the nearby villages and I'll try to come back one of these days.

When the tractor left, Raymonde opening the way in the van, we walked back to the house. The wives had come back from the market and we were to have a nice lunch inside, with the warmth of the cats and the heat of the stove. We also had a ratafia (pic on right), and I learnt that ratafia is made by mixing 50 % of freshly-pressed apple juice with marc (alcohol) and a bit of sugar. The ratafia has to be aged at least a year to integrate all its elements, otherwise it's not as good, because otherwise you feel too much the alcohol.

Survivor : Lone apple tree along a side road Bruno tells me that in the past there were many such apple trees along the roads of the region but that the French authorities, pushed by a European law, have forbidden to replant them when they happen to die, which is why you see less and less of them. The official reason is to protect the drivers in case of accident by taking away the lined trees which can be an obstacle. Olivier says that these European norms are ridiculous, and that the French share the blame for enforcing them and contributing to the demise of rich local traditions. And they do the same thing against the traditional cheese, he adds, by forcing the cheese farms to change their installation and turn their traditional chesse-making rooms into a white, spotless, air-conditionned cheese lab [I wrote myself several times about this incredible shooting-in-the-foot by the French administration, which thus forces many artisanal cheese-farms with no financial backing to stop making cheese]. Back to the old orchards and lined trees : The remaining apple trees often don't have takers for their apples, people ignoring the qualities of these old varieties and having stopped making cider for themselves. In the past, farmers would also use the fruits to feed the farm animals. Olivier says that this particular region, which is named the Puisaye, was drinking only cider in a remote past, people filling jugs of cider from their barrel in the cellar for lunch or dinner. Like Normandy, this region was virtually covered by apple trees.
The 4 friends source their apples from several owners, and recently they found an elderly couple (aged 80) who own a 800-tree orchard in a perfect situation : this is a wonderful orchard on a sloppy terrain above a road, which makes it very easy to pull the big bags to a vehicule. Usually they pay a rate of 100 € for a ton of apples if they have been picked by the owners (then, they just have to drive to the orchard with a van and pick the bags), or 50 € a ton if they have to pick the apples themselves. It's not that long or difficult and they often opt for the later option, if given the choice.

Cider pressing : an extensive video (11 minutes) showing how this mobile cider press works and how people do efficiently their work to keep the supply of apples for the machine and check the filling of the barrels and containers. I think that Raymonde and Gérard have a nice work here : they never work on the same farm, meet nice folks (people making their own cider must be great !) and contribute to a new start for cider varieties... The house Olivier told us a story about his grandfather who lived in Vendée (in the western part of France) : during his lifetime, his grandfather had been making a bit of wine, but he had an official/authorized production in parrallel to a grey production hidden to the French wine police. His cellar was also double, with a visible, official one and another one concealed with a secret entry, so that if the Douanes visited his farm they found only the regular part of his winemaking activity. The door to this secret cellar room was hidden behind a cabinet. Sadly, when he died, his surviving family was frightened by what could happen and they uprooted by themselves the illegal part of the vineyard to avoid the heavy fines if these clandestine rows were discovered by the authorities.

Comments

[Morgan Harris]

Bertrand,

I absolutely love this article.

If I'm not mistaken, they make a "ratafia" in Calvados as well, but I think it's called "Pommeau de Normandie" or something like that...

Do they use a grape marc for this or is it an apple-based spirit?

Best,

Morgan

[Bertrand]

Hi Morgan,

Good question, they may have told me and I forgot or something. I'll ask and come back here to tell, it's quite an important detail. You know what ? That very day we visited a guy who had a stock of spirit to sell, some being needed for the future ratafia. I can't tell more but this was utmost interesting for me.

[Richard Ewen]

Intriguing and moving story. I remember apple cider made from the orchards around Lake Erie in Ohio that tasted so good during my youth (1946-60). We got it from neighboring farms and kept the cider on the back porch in the winter and had what we called "hard cider" with a strong "kick" to its taste. I don't know how much alcohol was in it, but its tartness was significantly stronger than the original taste of the cider. I would certainly enjoy the apple/marc drink.

[King Krak, Oenomancer]

Such a great post, Bert! Thanks!!!

[Fero]

What a sweet boy! My favorite memories are taking my children to the apple orchards (since I grew up in the city and didn't know Southern California had them). They are now grown but look forward to taking the first grandchild.

[Simon]

Hi Morgan!
Pommeau is made by adding Eau de vie de Pomme (Distilled hard apple cider) to apple must (unfermented apple juice). It is then aged in barrels.
It is similar to Ratfia, but made only with apple products...