Serps ‘Lord’ Sidra
Location: Spain, Catalunya
Winemaker: Marc Fuyà
Apples: Story Inored, Mandy, Crimson Crisp, Opal, Fengapi, Golden, Manzana Silvestre
Sourcing of apples: Several orchards around Girona and the Pyrenees, including some located in a national park and sourced in collaboration with a conservation project. Other fruits and herbs are sourced either from the property or are wild-foraged.
Winemaking: Short maceration and press, all varieties fermented together with their own indigenous yeasts. Bottled before first fermentation finishes to capture the bubbles in the bottle. No fining, no filtration, and no SO2.
From the Importer Super Glou: ‘Lord’ is a seductive introduction to Marc’s ciders, sourced from a variety of orchards in and around the Pyrenees, Vall de Lord, and Cerdanya. A large diurnal shift coupled with a short maceration lend a delicate freshness, tartness and jovial bubbles sure to satisfy any gourmand. Decadent decadence.
The sun cuts through the clouds. A breeze carries the lush smell of many fruits ripening at a maddening pace under the Catalan sun.
We are wading through Joanetes in La Vall d’en Bas, an orchard now under the care of Marc Fuyà and home to Serps, a trove of Catalan ciders as charismatic as their maker.
“Apples are much more clever than humans,” Marc jokes as we pass by a tree which won’t bear fruit this harvest. “If you work a lot one year, the next year you go on holidays.”
Marc is on his third vintage of Serps, and he is certainly working very hard; this one-man show is churning out some of the only natural ciders in all of Catalunya. For him, Serps is a homecoming. After stints cooking food in London and Barcelona and playing music throughout the continent, Marc could no longer resist the gravitational pull of Girona. The biodiversity of its environs was enough to convince him that, slowly but surely, Serps would become his retirement plan. After all, who else was going to rescue all these apples on the verge of extinction?
In Catalunya, grapes have always been the favored ferment. As the traditional thinking goes, why make cider when you could make wine? But traipsing through Joanetes you feel the biodiversity of a forest, an entire ecosystem that overwhelms your senses, and you find yourself asking the same question Marc asked himself — why let the romance of all this fruit go to waste?
Our ankles are spicy from nettles and our lips sticky from figs growing wild. Artemisia, clover, walnuts, hazelnuts, plums caress our legs and arms as we continue to navigate, catching glimpses of the Puigsacalm peak rising in the distance. The only signs of civilization visible are the metal CDs Marc has hung to deter birds from the trees (Incubus, Slipknot, and his childhood favorite, Korn). Our mouths tingle from apple after apple and pear after pear : Reineta Terrera, Winter banana, Pell de Galapet, Gravenstein, Cardinale, Sant Jaume, Cor Glaçat, Eugènia, Verda Donsella, Camosa. You can only eat so many grapes but there are enough different kinds of fruit here to pack a couple lunchboxes. On the way back to the car, we grab some heirloom tomatoes off the vine.
It is a race against time.
We speed toward Santa Pau, a natural park cut out of volcanoes in La Garrotxa, a protected area which nurses the precious indigenous varieties Marc has committed to saving. It looks like Jurassic Park and feels just as wild. This past spring, he took 200 scions from here and planted them in Joanetes.
Thunder starts to roll in like an airplane traveling through the future. We are transfixed. The rain on the apples is unlike anything we have ever heard or seen, and we can only imagine what the coming years may bring.