Cider and national identity

Asturian cider is among the clearest cases anywhere of a drink carrying regional identity. The elements are all locally distinctive: sidra natural, still and unfiltered; the long pour from above the head into a wide thin glass; the sidrería and the chigre as institutions; the espicha; a vocabulary of its own in Asturian, a language distinct from Castilian.

That distinctiveness does political work in a Spain organised around autonomous communities with their own languages, institutions and claims. A drink that nobody else in the country makes, drunk in a way nobody else drinks, is an efficient marker of regional difference, and it is used as one — in tourism promotion, in regional government policy, and in ordinary self-description.

The formal recognitions follow the same logic. A protected designation defines the fruit, the area and the method; and Asturian cider culture — the growing, making, pouring and drinking taken together as a practice — was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2024, on a nomination pursued by the regional government. The subject of that inscription is the culture, not the liquid, which is a precise reflection of what the drink is being asked to carry.

Basque sagardo does comparable work in a different frame. The word itself is Basque rather than borrowed, the sagardotegi is a distinct institution, the txotx season has no equivalent elsewhere, and the whole complex belongs to a culture whose language is unrelated to any other in Europe and is central to its self-definition. Cider is one of a set of things that are specifically Basque.

It is also the site of the most persistent unsupported claim in cider history: that Basque cider prevented scurvy in whaling and cod-fishing fleets, and thereby underwrote Basque maritime success. Cider was certainly carried on ships, for the ordinary reason that it kept better than water. The specific antiscorbutic claim is repeated everywhere and is not established, and it circulates because it makes cider central to a heroic national story.

That is worth noticing as a mechanism rather than only as an error. Where a drink is doing identity work, claims that increase its historical importance are attractive, spread easily and are rarely checked. The same process operates on the Roman claim in Britain, and it is a reason to be more sceptical of identity-linked history rather than less.

France has an unambiguous national drink and it is not cider. The consequence is that French cider carries regional identity — Norman, Breton, and within those the smaller identities of the Pays d’Auge, the Cotentin, the Domfrontais — inside a national frame constructed around wine.

The appellation system is the instrument through which that happens, and it was built for wine. Applying it to cider produced designations that specify orchard area, permitted varieties, method and product type in the manner of a wine appellation, which gives cider regions a nationally recognised form of distinctiveness on terms set by another product.

The effect on presentation is visible. French cider is frequently presented in a wine register — the corked and caged bottle, the appellation on the label, the sweetness terminology — because that is the language the French drinks market understands as a claim to seriousness. Whether that helps cider or subordinates it to a comparison it cannot win is a live argument within the French sector.

Cider in Britain is regional and it is not national. Nobody proposes it as the English national drink, that position being occupied by beer, and its geography is genuinely concentrated in the west and south-west. What English cider signals is a county — Somerset, Herefordshire, Devon, Gloucestershire — and, unavoidably, a class position.

The class dimension is the distinctive feature of the British case and it has moved twice within living memory: from a wage good and a rough rural drink, to the associations attached to strong cheap cider in the late twentieth century, to the present position in which a premium orchard-based sector coexists with a mass market that shares almost nothing with it. A drink carrying that much class freight cannot easily be adopted as a national symbol.

Wales is a partial exception and shows what a national frame does. The Welsh cider and perry revival since the 1990s has been consciously linked to Welsh-language and cultural revival, uses Welsh terminology, and has pursued protected designations for traditional Welsh cider and perry. Here cider is doing national identity work, on a small scale, because Wales has a national identity actively under construction and a cider tradition available to attach to it.

The benefits are concrete. A drink carrying identity attracts public support, legal protection, tourism policy and institutional attention that a drink of comparable commercial size otherwise would not. Asturian, Basque, Norman and Welsh cider have all obtained designations, funding or promotional support at least partly on identity grounds.

The costs are also concrete and less often stated. Identity claims produce arguments about entitlement — who may use the name, what method counts, whether an outsider may make it — and those arguments are settled by specification, which fixes practice in place. A tradition that has been written into a legal document is protected and is also much harder to change.

There is a further risk that applies to all of these cases. A practice valued for what it represents can become a display of itself, maintained because it is expected rather than because it is the way the work is done. That is the point at which identity stops sustaining a tradition and starts preserving it, and the two are not the same thing.