The history of Apfelwein in Hessen and Frankfurt

The Rhine-Main region was extensively planted with vines in the Middle Ages, much of it on ground that would not be considered viable now. From the sixteenth century onwards those marginal vineyards retreated: the climate worsened, war and disruption damaged the trade, and better wine from the Rheingau and beyond reached the same markets.

Apples filled the space. Fruit trees were planted in the grassland around villages and along field edges, and by the eighteenth century Apfelwein was established as the ordinary drink of Frankfurt and much of Hessen. City records and tavern regulation follow the drink into the record from this period.

The substitution is the same one that happened in Normandy, on the same terms, for the same reasons and at roughly the same time. Cider countries are usually failed wine countries, and this is the clearest example of it.

The fruit base of Hessian Apfelwein is the Streuobstwiese: scattered standard fruit trees, of many varieties, growing in grass that is also mown or grazed. It is the same structure as the English traditional orchard and the Norman pré-verger, and it produces two crops from one piece of land.

These meadows are among the most species-rich habitats in central Europe, carrying orchard birds, deadwood invertebrates and grassland flora that intensive orchards cannot support. They are also expensive to maintain, since tall trees on grass cannot be harvested or sprayed efficiently, and their area has fallen very substantially since the middle of the twentieth century.

Their protection has consequently become a conservation question as much as a drinks one, with legal protection in several German states and with Apfelwein production presented as the economic use that justifies keeping the trees. That argument — that drinking the product preserves the habitat — is made sincerely and is worth stating carefully: it holds only where the fruit is actually bought from those meadows rather than from bulk juice.

The Hessian drinking apparatus is specific and old enough to be worth describing. The Bembel is a grey salt-glazed stoneware jug with a blue-painted design, from which the drink is poured; the Geripptes is a small ribbed glass, the ribs conventionally explained as giving grip to a hand greasy from food and as refracting light through a cloudy drink.

The Apfelweinwirtschaft is the tavern that serves it, historically with its own seasonal licence and its own food — sour milk cheese with onions, green sauce, boiled meats. Sachsenhausen, across the Main from central Frankfurt, is the quarter most associated with it and remains so.

This complex was largely in place by the nineteenth century and has proved unusually durable. Where English cider lost its own vessels and adopted the beer glass, Hessian Apfelwein kept its jug and its glass, and the drink is still poured in front of the drinker from the Bembel.

Hessen is not the only German cider region. The Moselle and the Saarland make Viez, a cider tradition with its own vocabulary and its own tavern culture, and Baden-Württemberg has a large Most and Süßmost tradition tied to its own extensive meadow orchards.

The etymology of Viez is genuinely uncertain. The two explanations usually given — from Latin vice, the drink taken in place of wine, and from a word for a quarter measure — are both plausible and neither is demonstrated. It is a small example of a general rule: drink words are frequently obscure, and confident etymologies in drinks writing are often the least reliable part of the page.

Across all these regions the twentieth-century pattern is the same: consolidation into a smaller number of larger producers, a decline in meadow-orchard area, a drift towards juice bought in from elsewhere, and a partial revival built on regional identity and on conservation arguments.