James Crowden is a soldier turned shepherd turned cider historian and poet. He is the author of Ciderland and Cider Country - among others - and In 1999 he was made the Apple Day Poet Laureate.
On this episode we trace the entire story of cider from the wild apple forests of Kazakhstan to the orchards of Somerset today. We talk about how the apple travelled west long before it reached France, why bears deserve more credit than they get, and the tragic story of Nikolai Vavilov, the Soviet scientist who identified those forests and later starved to death guarding the world's first seed bank. From there we move into England's golden age of cider, making the case that Christopher Merret and a circle of Herefordshire aristocrats, not Dom Pérignon, worked out how to put fizz in a bottle decades before champagne existed, and that it was English glass from the coal-fired forges of Newcastle, not French ingenuity, that made it possible. We cover the 1763 Cider Tax riots that helped bring down a Prime Minister in six weeks and gave us the phrase "an Englishman's home is his castle," the outbreak of lead poisoning that nearly finished off Devon's reputation, and the long slide of cider from the tables of the aristocracy to a byword for cheap, watered-down alcopops. We finish on the wassail, the community of small makers keeping real cider alive today, and where James thinks Somerset's orchards are headed as the climate changes, and he closes things out by reading one of his own poems.
If you like this episode you'll probably enjoy my chats with Tom Oliver, Gabe Cook, and Henry Jeffreys too.
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