Glossary · Cider
Viez
German. Kept in its own language here rather than translated into the nearest English word, because the nearest English word is usually cut on a different axis.
Definition
The cider of the Moselle and the Saar, fermented dry from local apples and drunk young, usually still and often from a handled half-litre pot called a Porz.
- Subject
- Cider
- Language
- German
In more detail
It is a dialect word rather than a regional one, and it travels with the dialect: the Moselle valley, the Saargau, the southern Eifel and Hunsrück, and into parts of Luxembourg. It carries no legal definition and no protected name — one of the few substantial European cider traditions with neither.
The origin of the word is disputed, and the version everybody repeats is the one the philology rules out. Latin vice, the drink standing in for wine, is semantically neat and phonologically impossible: a short i would have given ei, not the long i of Viez. Latin faex, wine lees, survives the sound change and fails on meaning — no European cider country names its drink after lees, and no text shows the word denoting anything drinkable.
The derivation that passes both tests runs through a 1413 manuscript from Prüm in the Eifel, which mentions a pott puitz. Puitz, pronounced with a long ü, would descend from Latin potio, a drink; early sources for the drink itself say Tranck and Apfeltranck. The pott is the same word as the Porz that Viez is still served in. Note also what is not among the candidates: the Latin vitis offered in some English writing has no scholarly advocate at all.
Where this is covered properly
The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.
Style
Viez
The cider of the Moselle and Saarland, dry and still in the local manner, drunk from a distinctive lidded pot and named from a word for the second pressing.
Region
Moselle
The German Moselle around Trier, where *Viez* — dry apple wine drunk from a distinctive earthenware jug — occupies the everyday place that Riesling occupies in the valley’s economy.
Region
Saarland
The small German state where *Viez* is most strongly identified as a regional drink, made from meadow orchard fruit and drunk as an everyday alternative to beer in a formerly industrial landscape.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Cider
Apfelwein
German apple wine: cider fermented dry from culinary and wild apples, usually still or lightly sparkling, sharply acidic and served in the Frankfurt region as a regional speciality.
Cider
Most
In German-speaking Europe, either fresh fruit juice or the fermented drink made from it. Which one it means is settled by the country you are standing in, and in Austria it is settled by statute.
Cider
Süssmost
Unfermented apple or pear juice, literally "sweet must". In Switzerland it is the standard term for the soft drink pressed from cider fruit.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Hochschule Geisenheim University — beverage technology
Hochschule Geisenheim · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
German beverage-technology research covering apple wine and fruit juice processing, including the enzymology of clarification.
Universität Trier, Digital Humanities, © 2022 · university · passage verified 2026-08-25
A university digital-humanities project on the Viez word, and the only source found that weighs the competing derivations rather than repeating one. Useful chiefly for what it rules out: the vice-vinum derivation that every popular account gives is semantically tidy and phonologically impossible, and the Latin *vitis* that circulates in English writing is not among the candidates any scholar has proposed. Retrieved and read on 2026-08-25.