Regional cider vocabulary

English cider vocabulary is concentrated on the physical operations of pressing and on cask management. Milled fruit is pomace, dialectally pommy or pummy. The stack of pomace built up in cloths for pressing is a cheese, and the cloths themselves are hairs — a name surviving from when they were woven from horsehair. The mill that breaks the fruit is a scratter. Cask fittings carry the cooperage vocabulary shared with brewing: shive, keystone, bung, stillage.

Fruit classification supplies a second cluster: sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp under the Long Ashton acid-and-tannin scheme, alongside older type words such as Jersey for a class of bittersweet fruit and vintage quality for fruit capable of making a balanced cider alone. Cyder with a y is a historic spelling now used mostly as a deliberate archaism, and in some usage as an informal marker of a fuller or more traditional product; it carries no defined meaning.

Welsh has its own terms — seidr for cider and perai for perry — and Welsh-language orchard and press vocabulary has been recovered alongside the revival of Welsh cider making since the 1990s. Cask capacity words such as hogshead and pipe were borrowed from other trades and their capacities were never wholly consistent, so historical volume figures given in them should be treated with caution.

French cider vocabulary is weighted towards clarification and the control of fermentation, which is what the Norman tradition has always had to manage. Défécation is the clarification of juice; the gelled cap of pectin and solids that rises in a keeved juice is the chapeau brun, the brown hat, and the clear juice drawn from beneath it is what goes forward to a deliberately slow, nutrient-poor ferment.

Product terms follow the same logic. Cidre doux, demi-sec and brut describe sweetness against defined thresholds; cidre bouché describes the corked and caged bottle; cidre fermier describes farm origin. Pommeau is fresh juice blended with apple brandy; moût is must.

Serving vocabulary is comparatively thin, which fits a tradition where the bottle does the work: a Breton bolée is a shallow cup, and beyond that the words are the ordinary ones for glass and bottle.

Asturian vocabulary is dense around service, and this is the clearest instance of the general point. Escanciar is to pour from height; culín or culete is the resulting measure; espalme is the momentary foam it produces; espicha is the tapping of a vat and the gathering around it; llagar is the press, the press house and the business; a pumarada is an orchard. A tradition with this many words for the act of pouring is a tradition in which pouring is the skilled part.

Basque supplies a parallel set with different emphases. Sagardo is cider, literally apple wine; sagardotegi is the cider house; kupela is the barrel; txotx is the peg, the call and the custom; sagasti is an apple orchard. Here the vocabulary clusters around the barrel and the seasonal event rather than around the pour.

Hessian vocabulary is centred on the drink and its vessels: Apfelwein, locally Ebbelwoi; the Bembel jug; the ribbed Geripptes; the Kranz tray and by extension a round; the Schoppen measure; sauergespritzt and süßgespritzt for the mixed forms. Speierling names the service tree, whose astringent fruit is traditionally added in small quantity to Hessian apple wine to supply tannin and assist clarification — a distinctive local practice with a word of its own.

Streuobst names the scattered standard-tree orchard, and Streuobstwiese the meadow beneath it; the word has become the standard term in central European habitat conservation. Austrian usage adds Most for fermented apple or pear drink, Mostbirne for the perry pear, Mostheuriger for the seasonal farm tavern and Buschenschank for the licence arrangement that permits it. Viez is the term used for cider in the Moselle and Saarland districts.