Cidrerie du Vulcain Turgowy

Name: Small Wine Shop
Price range: $$$

$36.00

2 in stock

Vintage: 2019
Region: Fribourg, Switzerland
Viticulture: Organic
Apple varieties: Tobiässler and Thurgauer Weinapfel

Cidrerie du Vulcain Turgowy is a dry and fruity cider, with refreshing notes of crisp apple on the nose, and a touch of white flowers.

Song: Shalala by Moses Gunn Collective

Additional information

2 in stock

ABOUT THE PRODUCER

About Cidrerie du Vulcain Turgowy

Cidrerie du Vulcain Turgowy is a dry and fruity cider, with refreshing notes of crisp apple on the nose, and a touch of white flowers.

About Jacques Perritaz

Jacques Perritaz is a ruggedly handsome forty-something-year-old. He could play the part of the outdoorsy love interest in an ecological doomsday movie. And he doesn’t just look the part. Until his cidrerie took off, he was a biologist working for the Swiss government. His work specialized in the preservation of natural habitats.

As a side project, Jacquez also kept a herd of twenty endangered Swiss goats. He rented out the goats to clear brush from isolated pastures (chèvres débrousailleuses). This ended abruptly one winter night when all the goats vanished. Wolves? Some thought as much. The following spring after the snow melted, Jacques found several goat skulls. The skulls seem to scatter over miles. Wolves don’t take their food to go, they leave what they don’t eat right there on the scene of the slaughter. The sudden disappearance of Jacques’ goats remains an unsolved, sinister mystery.

Jacques lives in Le Mouret, a small village south of Fribourg on the fringes of La Gruyère. This is the Swiss region where le Gruyère cheese and the best cream in the world come from. Wolves aside, it is idyllic. It would not come as a surprise if several of the girls in Le Mouret answer to the name Heidi.

About Cidrerie du Vulcain

Jacques’ cider mill is located in the basement of an old 19th-century tile factory. Though the building is large, his part is a collection of a few unadorned small rooms only: Cidrerie du Vulcain is cidre de garage.

After pressing, the juice is clarified for two days. Because Jacques’ varieties have less tannin, clarification without intervention is near impossible. He uses an enzyme to facilitate the process, but it is a natural extract of mushrooms authorized for certified organic uses.

Fermentation is strict with natural yeasts in stainless or epoxy tanks. It is vigorous for the first two weeks when it consumes about half the available sugar. At this point, Jacques’ true craft begins: tiring the yeasts with two to three filtrations, so that fermentation can proceed slowly, and the juice can eventually be bottled without the adjunction of sugar or yeast to finish its fermentation in a bottle where it will produce mousse naturally. Jacques, and this is uncommon, never artificially carbonates his ciders.

After the first filtration, the juice is put back into the tank. If fermentation is slow to restart, Jacques may add a little of the unfiltered juice he always keeps back as a starter, as in his opinion a slow restart is a vector for Brettanomyces growth. If fermentation needs to be slowed again, Jacques may filter again. All filtrations are light, on Kieselghur diatomaceous earth, the same equipment as used for wine, but Jacques adds (with uncontained exasperation) “The process is much messier with cider.”

There is usually a final filtration before bottling and addition of sulfur: he aims for 15 ppm total, well within the “natural” threshold. No sulfur is added at any other time, except when faced with accidents which are rare.

Pairing Ideas

Chillable Reds / Southern Dishes