It was a luminous December lunch when the idea for this cider germinated: our friends, Swedish importers and idols from Fruktstereo stopped by for a bowl of pasta during their trip to Central Europe. They told us that they were going to harvest some apples on the property of Christoph and Julie-Ann Hoch in Kremstal (whose beverages we love, love, love), but that it didn’t make sense to ship the fruit up North.

So we jumped in and picked the apples up a few weeks later, and brought them back to the winery to turn them into a TINY batch of cider. We submerged whole apples in their own juice, and let the whole fruit ferment, then we crushed and pressed a second time before finishing the fermentation in the bottle.

Disgorging windows are short in the Pannonian climate because it gets hot early in the spring. We missed it last year, so it benefited from an extended 14 months on the lees before being disgorged. We are happy with the result, and happy to have friends willing to do collaborative projects with no commercial sense whatsoever. There is a bit of all of us on this punchy label, which was designed by our best guy Simon Roy as always. It went to Sweden mostly, plus a handful in Vienna and in Switzerland.

We do not know which varieties of apple exactly went into this. But the taste is good, that’s what matters!

Less than 200 bottles produced.