Red winemaking with apples

Critical density is a figure from cosmology. It’s the exact amount of matter the universe needs to hold its shape — a little more and gravity closes it up, a little less and it comes apart. Everything rests on one number.

Cut an apple open and it’s not just juice — there’s pulp, there’s skin. All of it is the apple. So how much of the apple matters?

Cider gets talked about on one axis: dry to sweet. Nobody eats that way — there’s salt, there’s fat, there’s umami. If a cider’s sweet, the sugar does the work for you. Go dry and there’s nothing to hide behind, so the interest has to come from somewhere else.

Our theory: the apple is holding more than a press can take, and what it’s holding is exactly what a dry cider needs.

A red wine and a white wine can come from the same grape; the difference is that red is fermented on the skins and white is pressed off them first. Colour, grip, tannin — all of it comes out of the skins during fermentation. A good dry red isn’t carried by sugar. It’s carried by what the skins gave it.

With Critical Density we crush the whole apple, then ferment all of it. The skins break down as it ferments and hand over everything they’re holding — colour, tannin, aroma, character. It’s the most an apple will physically give.

Golden Russet is where it got interesting. It drinks like a dessert apple, and the books put it low in tannin. But it has a thick, heavy skin, and my bet was that the tannin was in there — sitting somewhere a press was never going to reach.

It was. There’s real tannin and real structure in this cider now — and the books aren’t wrong, they’re just describing the juice. That whole system measures what an apple gives up when you squeeze it, and says nothing about what’s still in there if you go and get it.

Tannin isn’t a property of the apple. It’s a property of the method. Doing it this way takes more time and more work than pressing the juice and fermenting that — but it’s the difference between reaching critical density and leaving most of the apple in the compost pile. We think that’s worth investing in.

— Ray