Twisted Hills Craft Cider

The Free Bacchus Story

Jo Schneider and Kaylan Madeira planted cider apples on their own land in 2008. Four years later they founded Twisted Hills, a cidery in Cawston. Schneider is a fifth-generation orchardist who grew up there. Madeira, a first-generation Canadian from Oliver, was 23 when they started, and makes the cider. By their own account it was the first stand-alone cidery in the Similkameen Valley, a quieter valley just west of the Okanagan that the Master Sommelier John Szabo has called “the organic agricultural capital of Canada”.

The cidery’s home page sums up its thinking in one line, that “the quality of cider will never surpass the quality of the fruit used to make it”. Cider is fermented apple juice, and much of the cider on supermarket shelves is made from apples grown for eating, or from concentrate, and finished sweet. Apples grown for cider are different fruit, higher in tannin and acidity, as Twisted Hills puts it. Tannin is the drying grip you know from strong tea, and in England cider apples are sorted by how much tannin and acid they carry. The Kingston Black in the Semi Dry is an English bittersharp, which means high in both. The Wild Ferment uses Calville Blanc d’Hiver, an apple that dates back to the 1500s, and Newton and Cox’s Orange Pippin go into the Dry, Pippin’s Fate, which Madeira has called a year-round go-to. When the National Wine Awards of Canada judged cider in 2019, the drier ciders, pressed fresh and neither watered down nor sweetened, earned the most praise.

Tangled Rose, which the shop now sells simply as Plum, is not one of the dry ones. Madeira makes it from cider-variety apples with 10 per cent Santa Rosa plums. Szabo tasted it for the 2019 awards and found that, despite the semi-sweet label, it finishes “sharp and crisp thanks to deliciously tart acids”. Two cideries shared Best Cider of the Year that year, with the final scores too close to split — a first for the awards. One was BC Tree Fruits, from the Okanagan. The other was this cider, listed in the results as Tangled Rosé.

The shop sells more than cider, and the organic certificate does not cover all of it. PACS certifies Twisted Hills under the Canada Organic Regime, the national standard, for Preparation, the making of the product, and lists nothing under Crop, the growing of the fruit. The certificate names the apple cider juice base, the apple pulp and twelve ciders, the Plum among them. The Pommeau, a blend of distilled cider and fresh apple juice, and the Plum Spirit are not on it, and are not certified organic.