Washington Gold Cider Heritage

Success doesn't just breed success or complacency or contempt, it tends also to spawn ersatz markets. Real derivative markets. The economic and popular success of the originals provokes an off-brand market for the knockoffs, popularly priced, crappily constructed imitations made specifically to capitalize on their resemblance to the prototype. Transformers has GoBots. Legos has Mega Bloks. Nick Nolte has Gary Busey. Led Zeppelin has both the Black Keys and the White Stripes. Coke has Pepsi. In Cold Blood has Executioner's Song. Arial has Calibri. The list of first editions and degraded cognates is long and illustrious. And the off-brand editions, they'll do just fine if you have no other option financially or opportunely, or if you're looking for something campy and cheap, but no one is seeking them out if they have access to the exemplars (the original Point Break and Chulahoma aside). Honestly, why would you? They require some sort of exigent circumstances to be pressed into action. They only become viable options out of sheer desperation.

Ciders made from dessert apples are basically the same thing, a secondary market dependent on the primary market. The cider can be okay, even pretty good in some instances (Apple Outlaw does okay with it), but in the end, you know you're not getting the real thing. You're getting an approximation of it. A likeness of it. A suppositious replica with apples pressed into action out of desperation. Washington Gold Cider's Heritage is one such cider. A replica cider made from a wide variety of dessert apples. Supposedly they use everything from Fujis and Galas to Red Deliciouses and Granny Smiths to make their cider, though that information comes from a blog entry and not the cidery's website. Remember back in the day when you would go to 7-11 with your friends and make a suicide by mixing all of the sodas together? In the end, the taste was always anticlimactic and indistinguishable. I guess the same could be said for suiciding apples to make cider. Given all of that variety, you'd think the flavor would be a little more complex or at least interesting but you'd be wrong. You're not left with something deep or rich or interesting in flavor but rather almost the exact opposite. Something boring and unremarkable. Not good or bad. Just... I don't really care.


Didn't someone say that the opposite of love isn't hate but the absence of emotion all together?

Anyway, my first sip tasted a little like a white wine which makes sense because Washington Gold is produced by a winery. After that, it settled down some but still had a bit of the tannic twist of a white. Several reviews I read claimed there was some apple pie to it but I didn't notice much of that. Maybe in a loose sense of the concept of the taste of apple pie, it tastes like apple pie, like calling a frozen pie homemade because you baked it yourself, but it's only a theory. A mere inkling. Apple pie filling maybe but not actual apple pie. Maybe one of those Hostess mini apple pies you can buy off the pastry rack next to the boxes of donuts and Ring Dings at a 24-hour corner store. If anything it tastes a bit like a cherry turnover, or maybe just those canned cherries they use for cheap cherry pies. The bright red kind with the sticky sauce. Toss some yeast into a can of those babies and see what you get. Might not be entirely dissimilar.

The cider has a warming on the throat that increases as I sit with it longer though it seems less like an alcohol warmth and more like a high-acid content burn. Not particularly pleasant unless you enjoy the feeling of something burning a hole in your esophagus. At 5.5% alcohol by volume, it's certainly not potent enough to give you that comforting booze burn. In addition, it's pretty much flat... actually, it's damn near completely flat. There's more effervescence in an open can of Schweppes that's been left out overnight on a park bench. The midwest isn't this flat. It isn't too sweet though, and it is slightly dry and has minimal residual stickiness, so there are some positive attributes to it. And it does look nice in the bottle. It's crystal clear and faintly yellow, like a rumor of yellow. Like if the National Enquireror did a cover story on the color yellow. It's the color of Donald Trump's bangs under cross-examination for shoplifting.

The folks at Washington Gold Ciders have been growing apples on their farm for over 40 years and they have some very nice photos on their website of the family picking apples and playing in the orchards. That being said, there's not much else available about them. No information on what apples they grow or if they supply all of the apples for their own cider. No information on their pressing process or their cider history. Though through careful digging and research, I did discover that the cider is made by Lake Chelan Winery, the winery created by the family farmers when the apple market collapsed back in the late 1990s and they were forced to diversify or die. Perhaps their experience and dedication to wine is why their cider is flat and wine-like. It's more an apple wine than a cider by any standard. 


The bottle the cider comes in is heroically large bottle though - too large at 1 pint, 9.4 ounces - with one of those metal-and has one of those hinged stopper caps you get on some growlers. Furthermore, the bottle layout is nice, somewhat elegant in it's simplicity and arty its design but I cannot fathom anyone drinking this much of it at once, thus the stopper. Probably better to bring it to a potluck and drop it off next to the Bugles before anyone sees you.

In the end, I think it's a noble effort though a failing one too. Just not enough here really. From everything I read, it seems like a decent operation run by good people so I feel slightly guilty giving them a poor review. Furthermore, the bottle I drank and used to write this review was a Christmas present so it appears that I am an ingrate - sorry Al. And it's not a bad cider. It's just not a good cider either. Maybe if I was drinking it on ice with some ginger... now that sounds good.

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For more information about the cidery visit them at Washington Gold Ciders or at their parent website, Lake Chelan Winery.