Follow Somerset's Cider Trail for England's Best Pours

“It was buried here in the barn, found under a load of rubble.” I’m standing at a 150-year-old apple press with farm owner Sophie Brendel ­— tall, linen-clad, with a basket of garden veggies on her arm — as she shows me the now-renovated oak structure, which resembles a loom or punitive medieval device. “Come late November, locals and friends help with the pressing,” she says. “We share cider, cook food. Exactly as it was for so many generations of farmers here.”

I’m at Thornfalcon Winery & Press, a cluster of lavender-fringed stone farmhouses whose orchards and vineyards are shielded by the encircling mounds of the Quantock, Blackdown and Mendip hills. Here in Somerset, the spiritual heartland of English cider, production is thought to date back to pre-Roman times. The county consumes and produces some of the UK’s highest quantities of the ancient beverage. It’s home to heritage apple trees and household names like Thatchers, Perry’s and Sheppy’s — and, in recent years, has seen a boom in new artisan producers like Thornfalcon.

“I didn’t want to just muddle through lockdown and go back to what I was doing before,” says Panu Long, Sophie’s equally tall, farm-tanned husband, who spent decades in the London drinks industry, heading up bars like the Met. So, the couple started making plans for an orchard and vineyard, moving here in 2022. Cider production started a year later.

Panu offers me a taste of Thornfalcon’s dry, naturally sparkling cider. It’s savoury, yet apple-rich — almost like a champagne or pét nat (naturally effervescent wine). “Like wine, cider flavour varies each year,” he says. “Last year was hot, producing lots of sweet apples.”

Thornfalcon also makes a hay-coloured juice — tangy, candied-apple sweet — that takes me back to childhood summers. But most of its apples are blended and then fermented for cider, a year-long process finished in the bottle for natural carbonation and rounded flavours. Their sweet cider is Panu’s pride: a honeyed golden-amber marvel made by ‘keeving’, a complex process involving temperature control and siphoning that starves the yeast, leaving sugars behind. “It’s a lot trickier than anything we do with our wine,” Panu says of the method that sprung up in the 1600s across northern France and southwestern England.

In the orchards, we find Kingston Blacks, Stembridge Clusters and Porter’s Perfection. “Old, noble varieties that produce fantastic cider apples,” Sophie says. Nature leads at this tranquil 40-acre farm, where little but the sound of skylarks fills the air. The lake has a woodfired sauna and family of swans, and the rewilded fields are home to three immaculately appointed huts for overnight stays overlooking orchards and vineyards. “We get our first grape harvest this autumn,” she says. “From vines planted three years ago.” The estate already produces rosé and a biscuity sparkling from local grapes. “By September, we’ll do tastings and supper clubs here,” Sophie adds, beaming, as we pass a beautifully buttressed 16th-century barn, mid-conversion. “A sort of magic happens when you take what this wonderful land produces and bring a creative process to it.”

Scrumpy Star

Weaving 45 minutes north leads me to the hilltop hamlet of Mudgley. It’s 10.30am on a Sunday and the corrugated roof of Wilkins Cider Farm is already snap-crackling in the sun. Roger Wilkins is shouldering sacks of spuds onto trestle tables sagging under hefty jars of pickled eggs and bricks of extra-mature cheddar.

“All local. You won’t get those in the supermarket,” says the wiry 78-year-old. Old pub tables spill into the yard; smart couples sip cider in the sunshine; locals sink pints, fortified by robust packed lunches of roast chicken.

Roger is the definition of ruddy, the flush from his apple-red cheeks extending to his slicked grey hair. He welcomes guests seven days a week — thirsty work that requires some 16 pints of his scrumpy-style farmhouse cider a day, he tells me. “I haven’t had a hangover or took aspirin since I were 20,” he says. Roger’s grandfather founded the farm in 1917. Its stone barns rake down an orchard-fringed slope, unchanged for five generations — much like the cider.

“We don’t add nothing,” Roger stresses. “Not like factory-made stuff: 65% water and six teaspoons of sugar. I call it Lucozade.”

A 100-tonne wooden press resembling medieval gallows towers to the roof. Each autumn, a blend of cider apples — the likes of Kingston Blacks and Brown Snout, grown here in orchards for centuries — are crushed and pressed, the juice transferred to wood barrels to ferment naturally. “I don’t test. I do everything by smell and taste,” he says. “And I leave it a minimum six months, up to nine. All factory ciders add fast-acting yeast, so it’s ready in a week. But you can’t get body and flavour in days.”

A trio of hulking 118-gallon barrels offer ‘dry’ or ‘sweet’, straight from a tap. Dry — the most popular — has a classic scrumpy, farmyard nose, landing an astringent tang on the tongue; the other is bittersweet with a funky apple finish. Both are hazy, amber and refreshingly cool. “If you want medium, it’s ‘arf-an-arf’,” says Roger, swilling half dry, half sweet into a jam jar. This, I conclude, is my preference, though I stop short of buying a 10-litre jerry can.

It’s rustic stuff, but Wilkins Cider Farm — a stone’s throw from Glastonbury — attracts a starry crowd, from Johnny Rotten to Mick Jagger. “Lily Allen used to come in with her dad,” he says. “She rang me wanting 40 gallons for her wedding.” We’re overlooked by a mural of Roger, attributed to Banksy, who’s said to own a pub in nearby Pilton. “But this is my favourite,” says Roger, showing a press clipping interview with Joe Strummer, late Clash frontman and one-time regular. “Joe said that chilling in Somerset with a flagon of Wilkins’ Farmhouse Cider was his little bit of heaven.”

Magician’s Flourish

An hour’s drive away, I find a magic trick in a bottle at The Newt in Somerset. “It’s subtle, right?” says cellar hand Max Warman. “If we tasted blind, you’d assume it’s a vinho verde.” We’re sampling The Newt’s Wyvern Wing Cyder in the sleek distillery that greets guests at the front gate, overlooking an 18th-century walled parabola trellised with 300 apple varieties.

The Newt, which is also a hotel, began production in 2018, a year before it welcomed visitors to its 3,000 acres of woodland, farmland and gardens strung between the towns of Bruton and Castle Cary. Its 65 acres of orchards produce 70 apple varieties, many innovatively processed using modern winemaking with traditional cider-pressing techniques. Crisp and zesty with a hint of apple, Wyvern Wing is a wine by any other name. “If I have cider with a meal, it’s this,” Max continues. “From a wine glass, to release the aromatics.”

Wyvern Wing is one of The Newt’s family of small-batch ciders (or cyders — the old spelling reflecting the estate’s Georgian origins), made using cold-fermentation cellar methods. In the case of Wyvern Wing, pinot grigio yeast is added, while méthode champenoise creates the champagne-style Winston. “We take inspiration from Babylonstoren,” says Max, of The Newt’s South African sister winery.

Unusually, Wyvern Wing is made with Braeburn apples. “Eaters can create interesting ciders,” explains Max. Most, though, use cider apples, which are tarter, with thicker skins — like Yarlington Mill Cyder, made with the titular variety discovered a stone’s throw from here in the 1800s. It’s a gently fizzy tipple, cider-tannic, with a toffee finish. But the Ice Cyder is the final magician’s flourish: made by freezing apple juice, it’s a dead ringer for the Canadian ice wines it’s inspired by. “And,” says Max, “it’s surprisingly good with prosecco, as a spritz.”

Top Somerset Food Experiences

The Newt in Somerset

Dine on foraged foods, cured fish and estate-reared meat at The Botanical Rooms in the Georgian manor house, or try veggie-forward lunches — fennel soup, spiced roasted cauliflower — at its hillside Garden Café, with sweeping estate views.

Frome Farmers' Market

Cheese is the perfect cider pairing. This east Somerset town market sells brie-style Bath Soft Cheese, naturally rinded offerings from Somerset Cheese Company and Godminster’s cracking organic vintage cheddar. It’s held on the second Saturday of the month.

Osip

Farm-to-table tasting menus at this Michelin-starred restaurant-with-rooms, in a former pub on the outskirts of Bruton, might include lovage broth, fermented potato brioche, black pig with grilled nettles, sorrel sorbet with rhubarb. Plus: house-made ciders.