Dorset cider maker triumphs in France

NICK POOLE is a man who likes a challenge. Which is good, because, as challenges go, persuading the French that our food and drink is better than theirs is a pretty big one. You might even say, impossible.

Nick began by founding the West Milton Cider Club, to revive the arts of Dorset cider making. Then he launched the Powerstock Cider Festival, which has prompted dozens of other South West groups to start producing cider. Gradually, Nick learned more and more about dry, medium, and sweet ciders, some produced from single varieties of apple, others mixed, all of them distinctively English.

But sparkling cider? Properly sparkling, that is, not pumped full of gas. These days, that’s a French speciality, a beautiful drink, and fiendishly hard to get right.

Nick experimented over here, then started going on trips to Normandy to find out more. He took up with a man called Jean-Pierre, who is not a fan of English cider. Visiting Powerstock Cider Festival, Jean-Pierre refused to believe that people could really want to drink what they were drinking. He threw Dorset cider on the ground. He looked indignant. His friends looked embarrassed.

So it was brave of Nick Poole to enter his cider into a competition at Bondeville near Fecamp, on the coast of Normandy. His best bottle-conditioned sparkling cider, French-style, but still with the potentially fatal handicap of having come from Dorset.

There were ten entrants in the class for dry, bottle-conditioned cider.

The judges – pictured left, in traditional costume – did a blind tasting. At lunch, at the show, it was announced that everyone was going to be sampling the second and third prize winners.

Nick said: “I thought they were absolutely fantastic – and they were only the second and third. I said, ‘I’ll never get as good as that’.”

At 5 o’clock the winners were announced. Top of the class for dry sparkling cider was one Mr Poole. Stepping up to receive his trophy Nick felt thrilled and astonished. “It was a great moment,” he said.

And the French? “I think it was rather a shock to them. There were gasps of disbelief when it was an English name that was read out. Somebody said: ‘Ce n’est pas possible’.” (That’s not possible)

Nick’s mentor Jean-Pierre was delighted and bought him a bottle of champagne.

Was it a fluke? Nick now modestly suggests that it was. He’s since opened other bottles which he’s convinced would not have done so well, because they haven’t sparkled in quite the same way. But who knows? The very fact that he’s so open-minded, so attentive to detail and so determined to produce a drink that’s as good as he can possibly make it, suggests that it was no fluke. Part of him knows that really. Question him, and he will admit, with a half-shy, half-satisfied smile: “The bottles that I did take were absolutely spot on.”