Hjulsjö 103

Our Vision of Cider
What is cider? Is it a place? A time? A thought? The fermented juice of one—or rather, countless—apples. In the rugged Zone 5, in the villages around Hjulsjö in Bergslagen, we harvest the variety of trees planted by previous generations who have since moved away. The people have moved on, but the trees remain. Wild-grown varieties, bitter little apples, large heart-shaped Astrakan apples, shimmering golden, freckled in the sun. We pick apples from trees so old that no one remembers when they first began to grow, hollow and impressive. Neatly pruned in the garden, wild along the ditch. We spontaneously ferment cider from the fleeting fruit of late summer, bottle it in winter, disgorge it the following fall, do everything by hand, and call it Naturcider.
Our names
'There is a whisper lurking among the trees'. 'Astrakaner from the old tree, as big as an oak'. 'I know of nothing but the sun'. Our various bottlings are named after poems by poets who inspire us, such as Edith Södergran, and capture a feeling, convey a thought, and lay the foundation for a conversation at the table where the cider is opened and shared. For us, cider is more than just a drink. It is an art form, straddling the line between poetry and agriculture, between nature and craftsmanship. It is not a product we recreate year after year, but the result of the many different stages that follow one another—from bloom to harvest, from pressing to bottling, and on to you. Some passages are taken from Märta’s book.