Posted on June 26, 2026
It’s time to bottle this year’s cider. I like my cider, and I think some other people do too. But. Is it good cider? I’ve been thinking about that.
It doesn’t taste like much of the high end cider I can buy here. Mostly I think because at this point I don’t have access to cider apples. But, it does remind me pleasantly of farmhouse cider I drank in the UK. It’s dry, often vinous, sometimes with that sort of bread or biscuity taste you get in dry champagne. Mostly I think you would mistake it for some minor white wine, say a chenin blanc or viognier. Anyway, I like it.
We all know many objectively nasty tastes are considered delicious in the right context, if they’re coupled with nutrition and tradition. So blue cheese is good and doesn’t repel with its notes of feet, vomit and rotten milk, because it comes with fat and salt and umami and we know it’s edible. And I think this happens with drugs too. I’m not that into cannabis, but I observe that many people who are can comment on the quality of the smoke, just like tobacco smokers back in the day. And something like this must happen with alcohol, because really who would drink wine with no alcohol, apart from people who learned to like the alcoholic version but can’t/won’t risk ethanol? We train ourselves to associate the sensation with the positive experience (of being high or tipsy) and then call it good.
Years ago, when my daughter was born, her mother and I decided we would buy some wine that could be drunk when she reached some suitable age. We went to the late lamented Rumbles on Waring-Taylor St and were persuaded to buy a bottle of Bordeaux on indent (that is, in advance, before it arrived in the country) that would plausibly last until she was 16 or older. And we paid a couple of dollars a year to have it properly stored. When I went to collect it, shortly before my daughter’s 16th birthday celebration, the owner of the storage cellar asked if I drank wine like this regularly. When I said no, he commented disdainfully that in that case I wouldn’t appreciate it.
At the time I was insulted, and on the night we all shared the wine and found it very good. But since then I have read that in blind tastings, people including experts prefer cheaper wines. And certainly, if you have to train to acquire the taste for something, wouldn’t it be smarter to become a connoisseur of cheap wine? What kind of idiot would spend huge amounts of money to get used to something they would never like as much otherwise? Such is the power of status and the glamour of wealth.
Recently I read W David Marx, Status and Culture, and then Blank Space. Both these books stress the role of small in-groups having customs that matter to them, as matters of status and identity formation for them, which then can leak out or be adopted by the wider culture, in different ways, depending on whether that in-group is originally a high-status one we want to emulate, and whether we ourselves are high-status (as a high status person I might want to demonstrate my immunity to scorn by deliberately adopting some low-status group’s thing). And the taste of and for fine booze, or rather what we consider fine booze, is very much determined this way I think. A small set of people in some social niche esteem some product for reasons of their own, and then others adopt it and study the nuances for reasons of their own. So we go from brandy to blended Scotch to single malt to unique whiskies from Japan.
Anyway, it’s no bad thing to enjoy your own product, and certainly I wouldn’t keep going if I didn’t. There is bottling to be done, and then after maturing or the exhaustion of my patience, drinking. L’chaim.
Comments
Comments on blogs are the OG social media. If you don't see a form here, you can email me and selected comments may be posted below.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.