It could be a wine tasting in any Kensington bar: “Pleasingly fruity overtones. A slight hint of . . . gooseberry.”

We swirl our glasses. Suddenly there is a terrible scream. The taster looks up, horrified. “Gooseberry?” “No, you’re quite right. Too strong. Raspberry.” But no one mentions the scream. It feels impolite to ask.

There is another scream. “Full-bodied, though.” A third scream pierces the night. I crack. What is that? “It’s the alpacas.” Of course it is.

We are not wine tasting in some fancy bar, but cider tasting on a Herefordshire farm. But this is no idle beano to the shires: I have come here for a weekend of Tolstoyan toil.

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Each autumn Broome Farm, a specialist cider farm in the Wye Valley, operates a sort of modern-day serf system to bring in its apple harvest. You, the merry peasant, pick its apples and, in return, the farm gives you free camping, a hearty home-made lunch and all the cider you can drink.

The weekend starts with a brief tour of the farm’s cool stone cider cellars. “I like to give each picker a tasting in the cellars when they’ve done their work,” Mike Johnson, the farmer, says.

That, to my smutty mind, sounds like the rural equivalent of offering to show someone your etchings. Not so: loving glances are cast and tender strokes are given, but only to the cider barrels. Johnson pats their fat bellies as he passes.

Broome Farm lies in the heart of the Herefordshire cider-making district. The farm is more than 400 years old and has been making cider for almost all that time and recently with considerable success: in the past few years Johnson’s ciders have won several national awards.

Many of his practices are as ancient as the farm. Apples are picked and sorted by hand, chemicals are avoided wherever possible and each midwinter they hold a wassail — a custom that goes back to Anglo-Saxon times.

During this they bang saucepans together and hit the trees with sticks. This, Johnson explains (with what I think is irony), “helps to keep the bad spirits from the trees”.

The farm’s methods of payment are equally archaic: it’s not only tourists such as myself who turn up carrying empty bottles to fill.

But before enjoying the fruits of our labour we first, alas, have to labour. I and my fellow workers climb into a trailer and are bounced behind an ancient, phutting tractor past Martha and May (the farm’s Gloucester Old Spot pigs) and also past (though I learn this only later) the farm’s alpacas. Johnson keeps these because, apparently, “the tourists like them”. Ha. We get out of the trailer and start putting apples into it.

As I fill the first ten buckets I feel a great sense of bucolic wellbeing: how delightful to be so at one with nature. For the next ten my back, more used to the office than the orchard, starts to hurt. Then it starts to drizzle. Why, I wonder, did I choose apple picking for a holiday? What a stupid idea.

Two hours later the trailer is full of rosy pink apples. The sun comes out. Johnson’s sister also comes out to tell us that our lunch is on the table. A native compliments me on how well I did. I feel smug. Apple picking, I think, is an excellent way to spend one’s holiday.

Lunch is laid on in the bottling barn. It is a splendid spread. Trestle tables groan under the weight of local cheeses, home-made soup and bread and an enormous pork pie centrepiece (a scion of Martha’s, apparently, which curbs my appetite). To drink there is home-made cider and apple juice. Bunting stretches between the beams overhead. Like the wedding in Cold Comfort Farm, it is almost too perfect.

After the feast comes the sorting and juicing. The apples are tipped from the trailer into a water bath and rotten ones are picked out. The rest are put into the mill. The resulting mush smells sweetly delicious but looks much less so — more like Mexican chilli cheese or, as one of the worker’s children puts it: “Like sick.”

This mixture is then folded into parcels inside a hessian-like material which are then piled on top of each other, slid inside a press and the golden juice appears, first in a trickle and then in a torrent. We catch some in glasses. It is sweetly tart and delicious.

Equally delicious is the knowledge that the day’s work is now over. It is time for the tasting. Before heading to the cellar I put up my tent in the orchard (“Pickers generally find it’s much better to do it that way round,” Johnson advises).

In the cellars the tasting is well under way. It is a serious process. In the gloom, burly men sniff their ciders with delicacy and use phrases such as “delicious bouquet” and “complex but quaffable”.

But whereas the vocabulary of cider tasting is as delicate as wine tasting’s, the ciders’ names are less so. No Pouilly-Fumés or Châteauneuf-du-Papes here. Most refer to apple varieties and sound like composites of the international phonetic alphabet. “What’s this?” I ask. “Foxwhelp-Alpha-Pippin,” Johnson replies, or words to that effect.

Cider buffs, too, are a slightly different breed to wine buffs: more T-shirts and trainers than chinos and brogues. If one drew a Venn diagram of cider fans and Star Trek fans, I suspect there would be considerable overlap.

One visitor, Stuart from Northampton, is wearing a long ponytail and a pleased expression: he’s just tried the FoxwhelpSomerset-Redstreak. “Wonderful,” he breathes.

Stuart is on the latest leg of a round-Britain attempt to taste all the nation’s ciders. Every time he holidays he goes to a different cider-producing region. So far, he says with pride, he has tried 3,800 (he’s keeping a diary).

The excuse for this latest trip is “to celebrate our second anniversary”. His wife is nowhere to be seen. Is she equally keen on cider? “Oh no,” Stuart says, happily. “She’s teetotal.” I wonder whether he will reach his third.

After Stuart, the next visitor is a fresh-faced young fellow called Toby, who, it turns out, owns Martha and May, the pigs. He runs a small local butchery — lunch’s delicious pork pie was his handiwork. An advertisement for his company is pinned to the wall.

Cider tasting might be a serious matter, but the atmosphere in the cellar is far from sombre. The carolling of the alpacas, which are stabled in a field outside the cellar, helps to liven things up, as does the constant stream of visitors.

Throughout the afternoon people with houndstooth shirts, spaniels and names such as Henry and Eddie appear, try a few jars, laugh in a hearty “war-har-har” sort of way, then disappear.

For Johnson, creating the right sort of atmosphere has been as important as creating the right sort of cider. “A hundred years ago the cellar of a Herefordshire farm was where everyone gathered and where everything happened,” he explains. “It wasn’t just a place for storing cider: it was the heart of the farm. We’ve tried to recreate that.”

Perhaps it is my seventh glass of Foxwhelp talking, but, as I totter from the cellar through the gloaming to my tent, I feel that they have succeeded.

cideronline.net

Pick your own

Cherry picking Rent a cherry tree. Pay £40 a year, picnic for free in the orchard during blossom time, and pick and keep the harvest from your tree, as much as 15kg of cherries. rentacherrytree.co.uk

Vegetable harvesting Pay a fee to support a farmer in Gloucestershire, and in return get free, locally grown organic vegetables and meat. From £35 a month (bursaries available, more expensive for meat), stroudcommunityagriculture.org

Grape picking Help the pickers at Pebblebed Vineyards in Devon to harvest their grapes in September and October. Volunteer for a mere ten minutes or a few hours, and get an invitation to a big, free helpers’ lunch in November.

Harriet Addison

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