The history of Asturian sidra

Asturias sits on the wet northern coast of Spain, backed by mountains, with an oceanic climate that suits apples and suits the vine poorly. The distribution of cider across northern Iberia — Asturias, the Basque provinces, parts of Cantabria and Galicia — follows that climatic boundary closely, and it is the simplest explanation of why cider took hold there and wine did not.

Apple orchards, pumares, appear in Asturian charters, monastic records and property transfers through the medieval period, which is the earliest firm documentary footing the subject has. Municipal and estate records from the later medieval and early modern centuries treat cider as an ordinary commodity, taxed, regulated and traded.

The classical claim runs in the other direction. Greek and Roman geographers describing the peoples of the north Iberian mountains mention a grain-based drink and the scarcity of wine, not cider. That is evidence about what those writers were told, not proof of absence, but it is what the record contains and it does not support a Roman Asturian cider culture.

A llagar is at once a press, the building that houses it, and the business conducted there. The traditional arrangement centred on a great beam press of the kind used across northern Iberia and on chestnut barrels in which the juice fermented through the winter, with the malolactic conversion that follows the primary ferment giving Asturian cider much of its character.

The llagar was also a social institution. Cider was sold and drunk on the premises, and the espicha — originally the tapping of a barrel, the word deriving from the spigot itself — brought people in to drink from the cask and eat standing up. That gathering survives, now often as a catered event, and its origin in the practical business of assessing and selling a barrel is still visible in its form.

The chigre, the cider bar of the towns, is the urban descendant of this. The distinction between where cider is made and where it is drunk, which in England became absolute, remains partial in Asturias.

Asturian sidra natural is poured from a bottle held high into a wide, thin glass held low, so that the liquid breaks on the side of the glass. Only a small measure, a culín, is poured at a time, and it is drunk immediately while the momentary effervescence lasts. The residue is thrown away and the glass passed on.

The physical reason is sound. Sidra natural is still, unfiltered and bottled without added gas; the pour aerates it, throws off some of its sharper volatile character and briefly lifts the texture of a drink that would otherwise be flat and hard. Whether the practice was reasoned out or arrived at by use, it addresses a real property of the liquid.

Its antiquity is another matter. The escanciado as a formalised, taught technique with competitions and its own vocabulary belongs to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Pouring cider from a height to rouse it is likely much older, but the ritual in its present codified form is not medieval and should not be described as such.

In the later nineteenth century, cider houses at Villaviciosa and on the Asturian coast began producing sidra achampanada — bottled, sparkling, sweeter and stabilised, made to travel. The market was largely the Americas, and it followed Asturian emigration to Cuba, Mexico and the River Plate. Cider became an export commodity for the first time in the region’s history.

This is a genuine industrial episode rather than a folk survival. It involved capital, glass, machinery and branding, and it produced the large houses that still dominate Asturian cider by volume. It also produced a second and quite different product: the traditional sidra natural of the llagares continued in parallel, and the two have coexisted, sometimes uneasily, ever since.

Emigration also brought money back. Returning emigrants, the indianos, invested in the region, and part of that capital went into the cider trade at exactly the period when it was industrialising.

Twentieth-century Asturian cider was made from a wide and locally specific range of cultivars, and the regional research and extension effort has been directed at identifying and characterising them. That work underpins the modern classification of Asturian apples by acid, tannin and sweetness, which is a distinct scheme from the English and French ones and answers a different set of questions.

A protected designation of origin for Asturian cider was established in the 2000s, specifying permitted varieties and production rules, with provisions covering sidra natural and later extensions to other styles. As with every designation, it protects a definition rather than a level of quality, and a great deal of Asturian cider is made outside it.

What is worth noticing historically is how recent the formal apparatus is. The orchards and the llagares are old; the classification, the designation and the codified pour are the work of the last century and a half.