Is it Merlot, Pinot Noir, or Chardonnay?
Nope.
Think it might be Zinfandel?
Wrong again.
The answer is Sultana.
"But that's impossible," you might say, "I've never heard of it!"
Ah, but you have! In fact, you know it quite it well. You know it as a large, pale green seedless grape available in every grocery store in America. It's a "table grape", not a "wine grape". But because Sultana is not used for wine it holds a different place in social and commercial contexts. It is, for lack of a better analogy, an entirely different product than those wine grapes named above.
Because of the fact that nearly 100% of the wines in America use only "wine grapes" and nearly 100% of the grocery-stores sell only "table grapes" we have evolved two different agricultural systems for grapes. There's the viticulture famously thriving in the Napa Valley, for instance, and then there's the massive grape farms located in less traveled regions which produce the blemish-free seedless grapes for super markets. Very rarely are wine grapes and table grapes grown on the same farm.
See where I'm going with this? Ever wonder why cider, from America's favorite fruit, is not revered as a fine drink in the U.S. anymore? And now that every apple farm in the country is producing cider these days, do you stop to ponder why all these ciders taste like a watered-down version of a sweet white wine? Do you question why it's so cheap compared to wine? The secret to this lies right there in the Sultana grape. Nearly 100% of the apple farms in America are growing the Sultana equivalent apple and trying to pass it off as equivalent to Merlot. It is not, and I repeat, NOT cider fruit.
So in the end we have a ruse. We have an exploding industry based almost entirely (no exaggeration) on a fruit that does not exist on American farms. Save but a fraction of 1%, there are no apples cultivated for producing fine cider. What you are drinking is Sultana in a champagne bottle with an elaborate marketing story.
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Post script disclaimer: I want to make it perfectly clear that Aaron Burr Cider is also effected by the limited state of apples in America. In our 750ml line of ciders (our "fruit-wine" ciders, blended with other fruit like elderberry and grape) we too use "sultana equivalent" apples, apples which were planted and cultivated on table apple farms. It's for this reason we have always kept this line separate from the pure cider line in the 500ml bottles (the Homestead line.)The purpose of this post is to prod the cider industry forward by way of cider apple cultivation. Relying on conventional apple farms presents a conflict of interest.
