Cider in the Nordic countries

Apple growing in Scandinavia is concentrated in a few favoured districts: Skåne in southern Sweden, the Danish islands, the sheltered inner fjords of western Norway, and the south-western corner of Finland. Beyond those, the season is too short and the winters too hard for reliable cropping.

That geography set the limits of what was possible. Fruit was grown for eating and for juice, orchards were small and horticultural rather than agricultural, and there was no equivalent of the West Country farm that made thousands of gallons for its workforce. Fermented fruit drinks existed domestically, but no cider industry grew out of them.

The Hardanger district of Norway is the closest thing to an exception. It has grown fruit on a serious scale for centuries, and its producers have in recent years obtained geographical protection for cider made there — a rare case in the region of a cider identity with genuine agricultural depth behind it.

The single most important factor in Nordic drinks history is state control. Finland, Norway and Sweden each established a state monopoly on the retail of alcohol above a threshold strength in the first half of the twentieth century, and those systems still determine what is sold and where.

The consequence for cider is direct. Drinks below a defined strength can be sold in grocery shops; drinks above it can be sold only through the monopoly. A category that can be formulated to sit under the grocery threshold gains enormous distribution, and cider is very easy to formulate to a target strength.

This is a good example of regulation shaping a product’s character rather than merely constraining its sale. The sweetness, the moderate strength and the flavouring of Nordic mass-market cider are all responses to the retail environment as much as to taste.

From the 1990s, Swedish and Finnish producers built a substantial export business in sweet, clear, flavoured cider — pear, berry and other fruits — much of it made from concentrate and served long and cold. The category grew rapidly in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the 2000s, particularly on the back of serving over ice.

This is a real and consequential piece of cider history, and it deserves to be described rather than dismissed. It substantially changed what most drinkers in northern Europe understand cider to be, it drew a large new group of drinkers into the category, and it did so with a product that has almost no connection to orchards.

It also had a straightforward commercial logic. A sweet flavoured drink formulated from concentrate is not tied to a fruit supply, can be made anywhere, and is not exposed to the risks of a crop. That freedom is exactly what an orchard-based cider does not have.

Alongside that industry, and largely disconnected from it, a small orchard-based sector has developed in southern Sweden, Denmark and Norway since the 1990s. It works with local dessert and culinary varieties rather than with tannic cider fruit, which gives its ciders a high-acid, low-tannin character closer to an eastern English or northern French cidre than to a West Country one.

Cold has also been turned to advantage. Ice cider, developed in Quebec, transfers well to a climate with hard winters, and Nordic producers have taken it up along with other concentration methods.

The Nordic case is a useful corrective to the assumption that every cider country has a deep tradition. Here the tradition is being constructed now, in the open, by identifiable people, which is how traditions elsewhere began before the record closed over them.