In 2014 we had successfully produced and sold two vintages commercially, and felt it was time to release some small batches. I don’t remember the reason but likely the theory was as much about what a producer like us was supposed to do at that point as it was about finding some unique terroir. The choice to make a small vintage on top of our normal one was maybe not entirely thought through. However confident we might have felt, the vintage as a whole was one of our most problematic in terms of the production making demands, that we were not even close to being equipped to meet, and although we got through it to produce good wine that summer had plenty of sleepless nights.
We were lucky though that our first small batch release was made special and worthy not because of something we did well, but because by fluke I caught a documentary based on a book called “Apple Kings – the last meadow apple growers in wild apple country” by photographer Lars-Olof Hallberg:
The book and documentary were about Sweden’s oldest apple growers, who still maintained (and maintain) old school orchards in the southern part of Sweden, with some rootstocks planted in the 18th century then grafted and regrafted over the years. I was looking to show clearly that ice cider was as terroir driven as any wine and so I got in touch with one of them, the orchard at Ellenäs, owned and run by the Almén family, to ask if we could buy some apples from the orchard. After some discussion it turned out that part of the orchard was planted to the Canadian variety Lobo.
It gave us a unique opportunity to test and execute the idea that apples carry exactly the same terroir as do grapes and it had a touch of divine intervention. A small batch of ice cider from Sweden’s oldest apple orchard using a Canadian variety, Lobo checked all our boxes because we’d brought a wine tradition that originated in Canada, ice cider, to our part of the world. The 2014 vintage came in at 500 bottles and for various reasons we only made the Lobo twice, in 2014 and 2015.
These bottlings were exceptionally important for us, in spite of us just making it for two years. They woke us and journalists and consumers up to what we were looking to communicate; that terroir was very much a real thing in cider that was made like wine.
Now we’ve decided to release the last bottles of Brännland Iscider Ellenäs Lobo 2014. We’ve tasted it and it differs from our other ice cider, in that the palate is softer and perhaps a little sweeter in terms of balance. It is really unlike anything we’ve done before or since. It will be an interesting one to taste together with one of our more recent vintages, to see how our wines have changed over these past eight or nine vintages. Our winemaking has evolved but tasting this I am amazed that it still holds up so well, seeing as we really were kinda clueless in those earliest days. It is a testament to terroir not only in the traditional sense of geography, topography, growth site, the age of the trees, but also as a way of showing how well ice cider works to bottle the soul of northern apples.