The history of Basque cider

The Basque provinces on both sides of the western Pyrenees share the wet Atlantic climate of the north Spanish coast, and the same agricultural logic: apples do well, vines do not. Sagardo — literally apple wine, from sagar, apple — was the ordinary drink of Gipuzkoa and the surrounding country long before wine became affordable there.

The documentary evidence is administrative rather than literary. Municipal ordinances in the Gipuzkoan towns from the late medieval period regulated the sale of cider, set out when and at what price it could be sold, and in some cases required that locally made cider be sold off before imported wine could be brought in. Regulation of this kind is a reliable indicator of economic importance: nobody legislates about a marginal product.

Orchards were held in small parcels attached to farmsteads, pressed at the sagardotegi, and drunk locally. That structure — many small makers rather than a few large ones — persisted much later here than in England.

Basque fishermen and whalers worked the North Atlantic from the sixteenth century, and the archaeology and archival record of that activity — including the Basque whaling stations on the Labrador coast — is substantial. Provisioning records for these voyages include cider among the drink carried, alongside wine and water.

This is unremarkable in itself. Ships carried fermented drink because water spoiled, and a coastal community provisioned its ships with what it made. Cider on a Basque ship is evidence about Basque agriculture rather than about nutrition.

What is not established is a causal claim about scurvy. Fresh apple juice contains vitamin C; fermented cider contains much less, and cider that has been in a cask for months at sea less again. No study has demonstrated that the quantities involved would prevent scurvy, and no contemporary source makes the connection. Basque crews on the Newfoundland run also worked seasonal voyages with periodic landfall, which is a more ordinary explanation for whatever difference in health is being asserted.

The sagardotegi is the cider house: the place where cider is made, stored in large vats and, during the season, drunk on the premises. From January, when the new cider is ready to assess, until spring, the vats are opened in turn and drinkers fill their glasses directly from a thin stream released from the barrel at the call of txotx.

The practical origin is straightforward. Buyers came to taste the year’s cider from each vat before committing to a purchase, and food was provided so that they did not drink on an empty stomach. The set menu of salt cod, omelette, beef and cheese with quince and walnuts is the fossilised remains of that arrangement.

It has since become a season with its own culture, and it is a working example of how a commercial practice hardens into a tradition within a couple of generations. Descriptions of txotx as an ancient rite outrun what can be shown about it.

Basque cider contracted sharply through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Railways brought cheap wine from Rioja and beyond within reach; beer arrived as an industrial product; and the industrialisation of Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia drew people off the land that grew the fruit. Orchards were grubbed or neglected, and much of the region’s apple stock was lost.

Recovery began in the later twentieth century, driven partly by the sagardotegi season as a social institution and partly by deliberate agricultural work: surveying and propagating surviving local cultivars, replanting orchards, and rebuilding a fruit supply that had shrunk to the point where cider houses were pressing imported apples.

A protected designation for Basque cider made from Basque-grown fruit was established in the 2010s. Its central requirement — that the apples come from the designated area — addresses precisely the problem the twentieth century created.