Why the cider regions are where they are

A cider region needs four things from its climate at once, and the combination is less common than any of them alone. It needs a cold enough winter to satisfy the trees’ chilling requirement, so that dormancy breaks cleanly and flowering is compact. It needs a spring free enough of severe late frost for blossom to survive. It needs summer rainfall reliable enough to size a crop without irrigation. And it needs an autumn long and mild enough for late cultivars to finish ripening.

A temperate oceanic climate supplies all four. The ocean moderates the winter so it is cold without being severe, delays the spring so blossom arrives after the worst of the frost, supplies rain through the summer from westerly systems, and holds the autumn open into November. A continental interior fails at least two of these: the winters are cold enough but the springs are frost-ridden and the summers dry.

Warm, dry regions fail differently. There is plenty of light and heat, and irrigation can replace the rain, but the winter may not deliver enough chill and the acid in the fruit falls away. Cider made in such places tends to depend either on high-elevation sites, on low-chill cultivar selection, or on acid adjustment in the cellar.

Plenty of places have the right climate and no cider tradition, and the concentration of English cider in a handful of counties is a historical fact rather than a climatic one. Kent and Sussex have suitable conditions and were substantial fruit counties, but developed as dessert and hop country rather than cider country. Much of Wales and the Welsh Marches had orchards, and much of that tradition lapsed and has been partly rebuilt.

The Herefordshire concentration owes a great deal to seventeenth-century estate planting, to a body of writing that promoted orchard planting as an improvement — Beale on Herefordshire orchards, Evelyn’s Pomona, Worlidge’s Vinetum Britannicum — and to a farming structure in which cider was part of the wage. When commercial cider making consolidated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it consolidated where the fruit already was, and the presence of large mills then held the orchards in place.

Transport did the rest. Fruit is heavy, perishable and low in value per tonne, so it does not travel far to a mill. Regions where orchards and mills were close, and where the finished drink could reach a market by river, canal or rail, out-competed regions where it could not. That logic has not changed: modern cider orchards are planted within economic haulage distance of a press, and the map of English cider orchards still traces the catchments of a small number of mills.

Normandy and Brittany reproduce the English pattern almost exactly: an oceanic climate, a mixed-farming structure with grazed standard orchards, a distinctive local cultivar set, and a set of protected designations that now formalise what was once simply local practice. The Pays d’Auge, with its heavy grazed orchards over dairy pasture, is the closest continental analogue to Herefordshire.

Asturias and the Basque country are wetter and more mountainous, and their cider culture developed around a very different serving tradition, but the climatic basis is the same Atlantic one. Their cultivars are their own, classified under their own system, and their orchards were traditionally on steep ground where little else would grow.

In North America the tradition is discontinuous rather than unbroken. Cider was ubiquitous in the early republic and then collapsed under a combination of temperance, urbanisation and the substitution of beer, taking most of the cider-specific cultivars with it. The modern revival has clustered in New England, New York State, Quebec, Michigan and the Pacific Northwest, which are the places whose climates most resemble the European originals — plus the specifically North American development of ice cider, which depends on a winter that Normandy does not have.