‘The night they invented champagne’ – in Herefordshire?
Museum of Cider Director Elizabeth Pimblett takes a look at the early days of champagne cider, who made it first?
There are some phrases which, as a drinks historian, can set your teeth on edge. ‘People drank cider because water was so dangerous’, or ‘Medieval children were baptized in cider’ or ‘top-class cider was always spelled with a Y’.
All not exactly so.
But what about, ‘champagne cider was invented by the Bulmer brothers in the late 1890s’?
Fred Bulmer explained how H.P Bulmer’s came to make ‘champagne cider’ in his 1937 book ‘Early Days of Cider Making’. Around 1892 he and brother Percy realised that they needed to know more about the science of cider, else their five year-old fledgling enterprise might otherwise go under. They employed a scientist to look into the best yeast for fermentation and he recommended a French champagne one. Percy subsequently went to France where he made a contact with a family of Champagne makers through the seller of a corking machine in Epergne, and having learned the principles from them he then went to study in the Municipal Wine Laboratory at Rheims. He brought back ‘the best French literature of the day on the making of wine and cider…And this was the beginning of the making of cider by the same process as champagne.’ This marketing leaflet circa 1920 explains it to their public:
It has become ‘cannon’ now, and the museum has the extensive Champagne Cider cellars of the original Bulmer factory to prove it. Filled with wonderful period equipment, and with painted text on the walls, the display explains clearly the steps of applying Champagne wine methods to cider. This was to become a major product for H.P Bulmer’s, renamed ‘Pomagne’ by the 1920s to avoid friction with French wine makers, but the method was still described as ‘Champagne method’ on the bottle for a while – decades later it was replaced by the cheaper method of carbonisation in tanks. In any case, in 1975 a French Champagne producers brought a successful injunction against the use of the term for cider and its use had to cease.
Quite clearly, the brothers applied French expertise but combined it with their own unique flair. How radical, to produce fine cider that could hold its own with great wine, but at a fraction of the price! In this the brothers – and Fred was a good cider historian himself- became the true heirs to the experimental Ciderists of the 17th century who applied sparkle to cider through in-bottle fermentation. This seems to have died out in the subsequent century, giving way to still farmhouse cider. (Or did it? That is material for another blog.) Certainly in Victorian times and an era of farmhouse cider being sold at the gate or to local pubs, the creation of a premium product, presented in champagne wine bottles, made cider appear to be suitable to be drunk once again by all social classes, rural or urban.
Except it may not be quite that simple.
H.P Bulmer swiftly became the biggest cider maker in the world, and deservedly so. But there was a plethora of contemporary cider firms or makers, mainly in the West Country at this time. And their marketing shows that they too were making similar products.
This image of Hereford cider maker’s E.W Langford on the left shows them proudly proclaiming that in 1897 they are making sparkling cider. On the right, this 1905 snippet from a newspaper for Magna Cider also shows that they were making bottled sparkling cider. They do not claim it is champagne, but elevate it by calling it ‘the sparkling wine of Somerset.’
Others, though, did claim that their product was ‘champagne’. This below undated photograph of a middle-class young man (c.1900)shows him drinking cider in a garden. A corkscrew wedged in a cork in it lies alongside the bottle whose label reads ‘Champagne Cider’. It is hard to see the maker but it is not Bulmer’s. And yet a Bulmer’s advert from 1910 seems to suggest the Hereford company was the sole purveyor: ‘The ONLY Champagne of the apple.’
The answer is, I believe, no. The brothers had applied the French wine-making technique scrupulously to cider. A marketing brochure from c 1920 goes into detail about how they made and laid down their ‘Champagne cider’, and this was the major difference between the Bulmers and other cider makers. I would argue that the latter used the term as an aspirational one: their cider was to be seen as a premium product, and if it was sparkling rather than true champagne method, that was unimportant. Although the gentleman’s cider in the photograph was in what looks more like a beer bottle, and not a wine bottle with a punt that could take high internal pressure as you would expect for champagne, the label clearly proclaimed the cider contained was ‘Champagne’ and therefore must have had some sparkle. A contemporary magazine article on Somerset cider (‘Black and White Budget, Feb 23, 1901’) throws some light: ‘The cider which is termed champagne cider is simply the rough cider carefully bottled. As a rule old champagne bottles carefully cleansed are used for the purpose. It seems to create a certain amount of fixed air itself, and nothing is necessary to be added to cause the sparkle.’ Should more ‘froth’ be needed, a grain of rice could be put in each bottle, or a little sugar.
In 1900, bottled cider and draught cider was being sold side by side in pubs, and sold in shops, farms and by post for people to drink at home. There were many cider makers to choose from, depending on your county. The Bulmer brothers were not operating in isolation, and they would have been very aware of what their rivals were doing. They were producing cider at a time when there was not the technology or machinery to develop it beyond the farmhouse gate, so they had to invent their own or adapt other machines for the factory. They were also skilled at early advertising. Was the claim ‘the ONLY Champagne of the apple’ just a marketing ploy to get ahead?
Bulmer historian L.P Wilkinson makes this point in his book ‘Bulmers, A Century of Cidermaking’: after he describes how the brothers won a gold medal for their ‘champagne’ cider and silver gilt for their ‘sparkling’ at the Paris Exhibition of 1888 (the first official year of their trading), Wilkinson provides the footnote, “’Champagne’ was used here in a sense traditional both in France and England to describe sparkling bottled liquor which had undergone a secondary fermentation in bottles with wired corks but not been ‘disgorged’ (second corking) like champagne. This is not an anticipation of the making if champagne cider by the same process of champagne, which was inaugurated a few years later by Percy Bulmer.”
It seems, then, that the Bulmer brothers were indeed the first to make true champagne-style cider, whilst their contemporaries made pét nat (pétillant naturel, where the cider finishes fermenting in the bottle, unlike the champagne method which requires months of fermentation, followed by months of bottle conditioning en pointe and in racks, frequent turning, and disgorging of yeast sediment before the addition of top-up cider or syrup, and the final re-corking with muselet wiring for reinforcement.) And with their other offering, the cheaper Bull Brand, Bulmers made ‘naturally effervescent cider’ too, with a crown cap.
No myth here, just two brothers applying French science to cider.
