AT LAST! - SOME REAL CIDER APPLES

Australians are drinking cider by the bucket.  Most of this - too much of it - is made from surplus eating apples, like the Golden Delicious (bottom left) and Grannie Smith (bottom right).  These produce run-of-the-mill ciders that are the equivalent, of, say, the industrial quality Murray-Darling Basin Chardonnays of about a decade ago.  Or, perhaps more accurately, the mindless whites made from Sultana before that. So it's exciting to see Warwick Billings, the ex-Somerset man behind the pioneering Adelaide Hills Lobo Cider company, striving to propagate varieties of real cider apples which had almost vanished from Australia. Here are examples of two of his latest plantings.  The tiny ones are Red Streak, although Warwick thinks they may be a very small strain of Brown's Apple, while the top row are the classic Kingston Black.  They're not much good for eating, but they make cider which is far superior. Keep an eye on DRINKSTER for reviews of the ciders Lobo squeezes from these babies.  Maybe it's time the cider manufacturers began listing the varieties they use on their labels, eh? ... photo by Philip White