Apples, apples everywhere

TOMASZ SOLIS dreams of the day when the countryside round Lublin, on the eastern edge of Poland, turns into another Tuscany: a place where motorists or cyclists make leisurely tours, stopping to refine their palates by sipping a delicate drink which only the local terroir could produce. But the beverage would be cider, not wine.

Admittedly, there is still quite a long way to go. For older Poles, cider conjures up memories of communist times when people home-brewed alcohol out of any fruit at hand. (This was illicit but tolerated, perhaps because a plastered population was less likely to plot counter-revolution.) One housewife recalls that she used to make cauldrons of strawberry jam in the hope that its sweet scent would mask the reek of fermenting fruit that her husband was concocting.

But things have changed. All over Europe, cider and its pear equivalent, perry, are being promoted as treats for sophisticates; the up-market bars of Warsaw are no exception. And since last year, when Russia barred fruit from Poland, the country has had a big surplus of apples. If you can’t export them, locals reason, why not drink them?

Poland’s cider sales are surging (an expected 18m litres this year, up from 1.9m in 2013) and producers like Mr Solis hope it could rival beer as Poland’s national drink. As vice-president of both the national fruit-growers’ union and an association of cider-lovers, he calls the newly popular tipple a “strategic development opportunity” in several senses. As he puts it, the Russian ban was meant to “kill us”—the orchard-owners of Poland—but instead has made them “stronger by forcing us to be innovative”.

As liquor-makers in other places could attest, innovation in the world of drink often means reviving dormant traditions—or inventing them. Bailey’s Irish Cream is now a beloved old product of the Emerald Isle along with shillelaghs and tweed, but it was first cooked up in the 1970s as a way to mop up a milk surplus by mixing it with whiskey. Perry was marketed about the same time, as a fun fizz for women, even though its makers could say, honestly, that such stuff had been made in England since 1066.

Mr Solis need not go so far back; his grandfather made cider. And now he sees a patriotic duty to dust down the presses and encourage everybody to gulp.