The Cider Revival Comes to Champagne
Cider Week continues, with vignerons reviving a traditional product in a historic region. Plus, 15 cider and Champagne recs.
Back in late 2024, at a tasting of Polaner’s Champagne portfolio in New York, one bottle in particular really surprised me, but it wasn’t Champagne. Winemaker Quentin Paillard was pouring samples from a bottle of Cidrerie de Verzy, the inaugural vintage of a traditional-method cider made by Paillard and four other Champagne vignerons: Flavien Nowack, Adrien Renoir, Antoine Bouvet, and Bertrand Lapie.
As a lover of both Champagne and cider, I found the idea of a méthode champenoise cider made by actual Champenois intriguing. U.S. cider drinkers are familiar with the Champagne (or traditional) method as the technique preferred by makers of “heritage” ciders, especially in the Northeast. The 2021 Cidrerie de Verzy that Paillard poured was captivating: bone-dry, clean and bright, it was vinous and complex. Its Champagne bonafides were evident. My curiosity was piqued.
As I came to learn, the five vignerons behind Cidrerie de Verzy are not the only Champagne producers trying their hand at cider. There’s a small but growing group making artisanal cider from local fruit, using both the traditional method and méthode ancestrale: Marianne Gamet and her brother Jean-François of Champagne Gamet; Clémence Egly (daughter of Francis Egly at famed Champagne Egly-Ouriet) and her partner Victor Bouvy; and new-wave winemaker Romain Henin, in collaboration with his brother Thomas under the name Korrigans.
It turns out that cider is not exactly new territory for Champagne; it’s actually a traditional product in the region. And while these vignerons are reviving a bit of history, it might also be a way for them to stake an early claim in the low-alcohol market—before sugary, commercial ciders gain a foothold in France.
In Champagne last summer, I drove to the grand opening of La Cidrerie de la Maison Gamet, Champagne Gamet’s new cidery in Fleury-la-Rivière, a commune located about 7 miles northwest of Épernay. On a warm Sunday afternoon in June, the cidery opened its doors to the public for a casual party. A DJ spun records on an outdoor patio while locals and other cider makers (including Paillard and Bouvy) chatted, ate savory crêpes, drank cider, and shopped from local artisans at tables set up inside the two-story building.
I read through an exhibit on the construction of the cidery, an undertaking that involved the renovation of a building, once owned by the Gamet siblings’ great-grandfather, that sits atop 19th-century tunnels dug into the tuffeau soils of this part of the Marne Valley. In the rubble of the building, the Gamets found an old press that was once used to make cider for the family’s personal consumption.
The region of Champagne is, of course, synonymous with the traditional-method sparkling wine that completely dominates its economy. There was once a time when the region produced many agricultural products, and orchards were a significant part of the region’s farming. But post-World War II, as the popularity of sparkling wine exploded, orchard fruits and other crops were abandoned as growers focused all their time and investment onto grape growing. The result is a vast monoculture of more than 34,000 hectares of vines.
The day after the cidery opened, I met with Marianne and Jean-François at the Gamet domaine in Mardeuil, on the left bank in the Marne Valley. The siblings are the fourth generation to lead their family’s estate. At the tasting-room table, Marianne showed me pictures of an antique book about the region that she found at a flea market. The volume included detailed maps with a list of all the cideries that had once existed in the area. “We had a history of cider here, but it just disappeared,” Marianne said.
Some producers, including the Gamets and Victor Bouvy, are now rehabilitating and planting orchards in Champagne. For Champagne Gamet, it began as an opportunity to increase agricultural diversity on the farm, much like the estate’s apiary. But apple farming has since taken on another dimension for the domaine.
Marianne’s brother, Jean-François, studied cider making while working in wine in the U.K. and he now leads the Gamet cider project. For the first cider he made, the apples were sourced from an orchard in the Marne that once belonged to his grandfather, with trees that are about 50 years old. Jean-François now farms that orchard and planted more trees in Mardeuil and Fleury-la-Rivière.
After experimenting with different European apple varieties, Jean-François settled on Avrolle, a bittersweet cider apple. It’s 80 percent of the blend in the Gamet assemblage cider (the rest is Dabinett, Harry Master, and Chanteline) and Jean-François makes it into a single-varietal bottling, too. “I like the freshness, the sourness, and it’s not too aromatic,” he said of the variety.
Jean-François experimented with using the Champagne method for his ciders, but the results were unsatisfactory, so he settled on the méthode ancestrale, a pét-nat cider bottled with natural yeasts and no disgorgement. His ciders are off-dry, balanced with concentrated fruit, sharp acidity, and pleasing tannins. This method also allows Maison Gamet to bottle for a range of sizes, from 330 mL to 20-liter draft pours—an advantage for introducing the product to new consumers.
Jean-François allowed me to try a quince, or coing, cider he was finishing, before its official release. It was made with a Portuguese variety grown in Narbonne in southeastern France. It was generous on the nose and palate, but dry, with grippy tannins. He has more cider experiments planned, including some with citrus fruits.
A few days later, I headed to Bouzy, to meet with Quentin Paillard. Quentin and his brother Antoine are the eighth generation to head their family’s historic domaine, Champagne Pierre Paillard. When I arrived, the domaine was a hive of activity, with staff cleaning barrels and readying for the work of late summer.
Paillard led me through a tasting of the domaine’s Champagnes and then we turned to cider. Cidrerie de Verzy began when winemaker Antoine Bouvet obtained some juice from Normandy and was experimenting with making cider, asking his friends for their thoughts—“just for fun,” Paillard explained. The five winemakers decided to make cider together, a project between friends. They are reviving a traditional product in the region, but not with traditional cider methods. “Our mindset is more like a wine mindset,” Paillard said.
“We always liked cider, we never liked it very sweet, and we have all the experience of making sparkling wine, making Champagne,” he explained. “We’re utilizing all of the same equipment. The handling and the vinification, everything is the same.”
The fruit (a mix of six apple varieties) is pressed in a traditional basket press before fermenting for nearly a year in barrel—a long, slow natural fermentation that adds complexity. Natural sugar from apples, in the form of must, is added to the bottle to initiate the second fermentation, and the cider rests on the lees for at least a year before disgorgement. The cider gains alcohol from a second fermentation, giving the wine body and balance. The result is bone-dry, structured, and complex, with laser-like acidity and elegant tannins.
The apples for the 2022 vintage were sourced from Champagne, from an organic rehabilitated orchard near Côte de Sézanne. (Apples from Normandy were mixed in for the 2023 bottling because there was no local crop, a problem with growing apples in Europe as in the U.S.)
The 2022 vintage had ripe red apple and golden apple aromas. The first vintage of the apple cider was the 2021 that I tried in New York, and I mentioned that I remembered it having more green apple and citrus notes. “There was less fruit that year because it was harvested in December,” Paillard explained. “The 2022 was harvested in late September. Just like the grapes, the season was insanely warm so they peaked much sooner. There’s less acidity and more fruit.”
Vintage variation can also be explained by the fact that the group is learning and tweaking the process every year. “We’re adding reserves to it now,” Paillard said. “The latest vintage that we bottled, we added 2021 and 2022 to it, just like wine.”
Cidrerie de Verzy now makes a poiré sec, too, a pear cider (or perry, as it’s called in the U.K.) that is vinified exactly the same way as the apple cider. The pears are sourced from Domfront in Normandy, the “grand cru” of pears, where some of the trees are 100 to 300 years old. “I think it’s even more interesting than the apple cider. It has a lot of aromatics, a lot of texture,” Paillard confided. “I think it’s much closer to wine than apples.”
Ranging from about 5 to 8 percent abv, ciders like those from Champagne Gamet and Cidrerie de Verzy are well positioned to satisfy demand for high-quality low-alcohol offerings in bars and for home consumption, especially in France, given that sweet ciders made on an industrial scale (like Angry Orchard in the U.S., or Kopparberg in Sweden) have yet to gain traction in France.
“In France we still have an old-school image for cider,” Marianne told me. “But it will be the role of the growers, the winemakers to ensure that the low-alcohol market is quality and well made.”
“If they don’t invest in this market, it will be industrial,” she warned.
Champagne knows a thing or two about the perils of industrialization; the rise of grower-producers was a reaction to it. So while these producers bring their knowledge and experience to cider (in particular, a priority on quality fruit), maybe they can also transfer some Champagne cachet to cider for the American consumer, a market that perennially sees apple wine as a second-rate product.
Beyond seizing on opportunities in the low-alc market, rehabilitating orchards or planting new ones for cider (no matter how small in scale) is a way to increase biodiversity in a region that is dominated, both economically and visually, by a single crop. “We’re entering the time of year that I really hate, because it looks like a sea of vines and there is nothing else,” Paillard lamented when I spoke with him in midsummer.
Before I met with Paillard, I made an early-morning visit to les Faux de Verzy, a stand of several hundred rare dwarf beech trees—some up to 500 years old—within a protected national forest on the Montagne de Reims. In the midst of summer, with full foliage, each tree formed a perfect green umbrella above twisted, gnarled trunks. There are all kinds of theories and legends as to why the trees grow this way, but the exact cause is unknown. It seemed remarkable that these ancient trees had survived for hundreds of years. I was only slightly less amazed at the thought of decades-old apple trees surviving somewhere out in that sea of vines beyond the forest.
The new wave of cider making in Champagne is a revival, but it’s also preservation, both environmental and cultural. Whether it’s five vignerons coming together to make a cider, or friends sharing a moment—un moment de partage, as the French call it—over a bottle of that cider, there is something more at stake here than just what’s in the glass.
Below are my recommendations, both for ciders from Champagne and Champagne from those vignerons that make cider.
15 Ciders and Champagnes
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