Fermented fruit drinks outside Europe

The first thing to separate in this subject is the process from the ingredient. Fermentation of a sugary liquid requires no technology and no transmission: yeasts are ubiquitous, the substrate ferments itself, and every society that stored sweet plant material discovered the result. Palm wine across west and central Africa and much of tropical Asia, date and fig ferments across the Near East, agave sap in Mesoamerica, and the maize-based drinks of the Andes are all independent instances of the same physical fact.

The apple is a different kind of question, because a tree is a much less portable thing than a technique. Malus domestica is a temperate species with a chilling requirement: it needs a sustained cold period to flower properly, and it does poorly where winters are mild or summers very hot. That requirement, more than any cultural preference, drew the boundary of apple growing across the Old World.

The consequence is that the geography of cider before the sixteenth century is essentially the geography of the apple: temperate Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus, Central Asia, and parts of northern China. Beyond that, fermented fruit drink was made from whatever the local flora offered, and the apple simply was not in the list.

Residue analysis of pottery has established fermented beverages at very early dates in several parts of the world, and the technique has genuinely changed what is known about early drink. What it identifies well is the presence of a fermented plant preparation; what it identifies badly is which fruit was in it. Malic acid and simple sugar markers occur across a wide range of plants and degrade in the ground, and many early ferments appear to have been mixtures of grain, honey and fruit rather than single-fruit drinks.

This matters for cider because the literature is regularly quarried for early-origin claims. A vessel from an early Chinese or Near Eastern site that carried a mixed fermented drink including some fruit component is evidence for fermented drink, not for cider, and an author who cites it as the earliest cider has extended the finding well past what its authors claimed for it.

The methodological position is the same one this pillar takes for Europe. Residue work places fermented fruit drinks deep in prehistory across Eurasia; it does not isolate an apple tradition inside that, anywhere.

The most striking absence is in Central Asia. The wild apple forests of the Tian Shan hold the species from which the domestic apple principally descends, and the fruit there includes trees whose apples are large and palatable without any selection at all. If a fermented apple drink were the natural consequence of abundant apples, this is where it should be.

It is not. The drink traditions of the Central Asian steppe and mountain belt are built on fermented mare’s milk and on grain, and no apple-drink tradition of comparable standing is recorded there. The likeliest explanation is that a pastoral economy ferments what it has in quantity, and what it has in quantity is milk.

Northern China grew several Malus species and other pome fruit, and Chinese fermented drinks are ancient and well documented. Fruit appears in them, and there is no reason to doubt that fermented pome-fruit preparations were made. What is absent is an apple-drink tradition with a name, a technology and an economy attached to it, of the kind that emerged in western Europe.

Everything outside temperate Eurasia begins with transplantation. Apple trees and grafting wood went with European settlement to North America from the early seventeenth century, to southern Africa, to Australia and New Zealand in the late eighteenth and nineteenth, and to Chile and Argentina in the same period. In each case the cider that followed is younger than the orchards, and the orchards are younger than the ships.

Japan is the clearest late case. Western apple cultivars were introduced during the Meiji period as part of a deliberate programme of agricultural modernisation, and apple growing became established in the north of the country. What followed was a fruit industry rather than a drink tradition, and Japanese cider as a fermented product is a recent development on that base.

The honest framing for all of these is that they are extensions of a European crop, not independent origins. That is a less romantic account than a world of parallel cider traditions, and it is the one the distribution of the tree supports.

The appeal of a global antiquity for cider is the same appeal that produces the Roman claim in Britain: it dignifies the drink by making it old and universal. It also draws on a real and reasonable intuition, which is that people everywhere fermented fruit — and that intuition is correct. The error is in the last step, from fermented fruit to cider.

Stated carefully, the position is this. Fermented fruit drink is one of the oldest and most widely distributed things humans make. Cider, meaning fermented apple juice made deliberately and repeatedly, is a regional tradition of temperate Eurasia that was exported worldwide in the last four centuries. Both halves of that sentence are worth knowing, and collapsing them into one another loses the interesting part.