Organic and low-input cider orchards

The reason organic apple growing is difficult in temperate maritime climates is largely cosmetic. Scab marks the skin, sooty blotch and fly speck discolour it, insect damage scars it, and none of that is acceptable in a graded pack. An organic dessert grower is therefore fighting for appearance under conditions that make appearance hard to protect.

Take the appearance requirement away and the problem changes shape entirely. Scab still costs canopy and cracks fruit, and it still matters, but at a threshold far above the one a dessert grower works to. Codling moth damage costs essentially nothing directly. Russeting, sooty blotch and superficial marking cost nothing at all. Much of the gap between conventional and organic production simply disappears when the crop is destined for a press.

This is why organic and low-input production is more common in cider fruit than in dessert fruit, and why a large number of traditional standard orchards would meet organic standards without changing anything they do. What they generally lack is certification, which costs money and administration that a low-value crop does not obviously repay.

Scab is the hardest. Without synthetic fungicides the available tools are sanitation, canopy management, resistant cultivars and a limited set of permitted materials, principally sulphur, whose use has its own constraints and which can cause russeting and affect predatory mites. In a wet spring with repeated infection periods, holding scab below the level at which it defoliates trees is genuinely difficult.

Copper compounds are used against canker and other diseases in some organic systems, and their use is restricted or being reduced in several jurisdictions on account of copper accumulation in soil. This is a live regulatory area and one where the position differs by country, so it is worth checking current rules rather than relying on a general statement.

Weed control around young trees is the other practical difficulty, since the weed-free circle that establishment depends on has to be achieved by mulching, mowing or mechanical means rather than by herbicide. It is entirely achievable and it costs labour, which for a small planting is manageable and for a large one is not trivial.

The consequence of low-input growing that most directly affects the finished drink has nothing to do with pests. An orchard that receives no nitrogen fertiliser produces fruit whose juice is low in yeast-assimilable nitrogen, and a grazed traditional orchard is often lower still. Juice from such fruit ferments slowly, is prone to stalling, and is more likely to produce hydrogen sulphide and related sulphidic aromas as stressed yeast scavenges for nitrogen.

In the French tradition this deficiency is not a problem but a prerequisite. Keeving depends on juice sufficiently poor in nitrogen that the fermentation stalls of its own accord once the pectin gel has carried the nutrients out of the liquid, leaving a sweet, low-alcohol cider. Low-nitrogen fruit from unfertilised orchards is precisely what the process requires, and a well-fertilised bush orchard produces juice that keeves badly.

So the orchard decision determines which cellar options are open. A maker with low-nitrogen juice can add nutrient and ferment conventionally, or can use the deficiency deliberately. What they cannot do is ignore it, and discovering it when the ferment stops is the expensive way to find out.