Volume 1: Ichi-go, Ichi-e

14th September 2023

Once in a Lifetime, Little Pomona, still cider, Herefordshire, UK

Trousseau, Edaphos by Ernest, red wine, California, USA

In the television series Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, the young makanai, Kiyo, cook of the household, explains the joy of meeting ingredients anew each day to the geisha Momoko. In reply, Momoko mentions the idea of ichi-go, ichi-e (written in kanji as a four-character idiom: ‘一期一会’). Literally ‘one time, one meeting,’ the phrase is often translated as ‘once in a lifetime’, a reminder to value each small interaction.

If we are attentive, every cork pulled from a bottle of real wine or cider creates and releases this same tension. We anticipate the excitement of discovery and feel the death of that particular bottle. Each bottle will be slightly different, just as each version of us, the drinkers, is different. What we taste will change with set and setting. One day a birthday celebration, another a parking fine in the post. We can no more drink the same wine twice, than step again into the same river.

In this way, fine drinks seem alive, dynamic and shifting. In his book Beauty and the Yeast, philosopher Dwight Furrow argues that great wines express vitality, including ‘exemplifying variation, resistance to degradation, … movement on the palate, aroma notes that emerge and fade and emerge again, their persistence and variation over many years, the harmonising of contrast and paradox’.

Crafted products that are capable of this richness are fascinating to get to know. They change slowly but continually in the bottle, some holding their appeal for a few short years, and some for centuries. These changes are not always linear, they retire for a while, open again boasting a fresh wardrobe, close again. The fresh fruit will fade, but with great wines it is often replaced by dried fruit flavours, nuts and earthy savouriness. Many other factors determine the mood a wine will be in when you pour a glass. How long it has been open; its temperature; the glass itself; what you are eating and whether any sediment is dispersed through the liquid, or settled at the bottom of the bottle.

Encounters with drinks at tasting events are all about first impressions. These events can be bustling elbow-fests, with a degree of sensory overload that threatens careful contemplation. But occasionally you discover something shockingly bright, a colourful coat glinting in the crowd. You leave the tasting and many of the other delicious drinks fade into the background. When will I taste that again? What can I do with it? Could we get popcorn at the movies? I just know it would get on well with my friends! This kind of experience - at a thronged Fine Cider tasting - with Once in a Lifetime, a still cider by Little Pomona, inspired Borderlands.

Susanna and James Forbes released their first ciders as Little Pomona in 2017, working with apples from their own orchard in Thornbury, and others across Herefordshire. They are extremely skilled makers and yet continually experimenting. Once in a Lifetime is the outcome of one such experiment. It is the confluence of a particular type of apple, an ageing technique and their gentle approach to guiding drinks into existence.

“I don’t know, if we could repeat it, whether we would try,” says James. “It happened because we don’t try to control things. Part of the joy and the interest is to let nature do its thing. When we see something we like, we can capture it”. James describes a series of decisions that went into the making of Once in a Lifetime. Firstly, the choice of the Egremont Russet variety. It is an eating apple, rather than a traditional cider apple, but one that is increasingly used in the cider community, in part due to the success of makers such as Little Pomona. The russeting on the skins of these apples allows a little moisture loss after harvest, concentrating and ripening the flavour. This variety also retains acidity well when ripening, so James decided to wait a few days after harvesting in 2021 before pressing the apples.

The juice was initially fermented in stainless steel tanks, which does not impart its own flavour to the cider, but was then transferred to ten barrels formerly used for white wine in Burgundy. After six months of ageing, just one of these barrels went on to become Once in a Lifetime. It was considered for a blend, but the distinctive qualities shone, the decision was made and the moment captured. This series of decisions mark out a forking path, that if taken differently would have made the drink a different one: a different meeting at a different time.

I can’t know how this will taste for you. For me, it expresses a complexity and vitality that I had not tasted in cider. It is a still cider, showing pure orchard fruit flavours melded with wonderful richness from the seasoned barrel, yet not at the expense of balance or precision. There is subtle textural grip, with great finesse. The lovely bright acidity works well with food, but it’s superb on its own as a drink to ponder and enjoy.

Seen as a statement about achieving excellence in making, I hope ‘Once in a Lifetime’ is not true. Hearing more about the ethos at Little Pomona, it’s clear that the unrepeatable thing about this cider is not the level of quality, but the particularity of this harvest, this barrel, and the time it is aged, bottled and ultimately drunk. This is why drinks like this are the antithesis of mass-market standardisation, regardless of whether they are wine, cider or another kind of ferment.

My acquaintance with Edaphos Trousseau 2019 began when tasting with its importer, Jennifer Williams-Bulkely of Ally Wines. Soon after, winemaker Joseph Ryan visited London for an event, and further fleshed out the character of this wine. If Egremont Russet apples grow well in Herefordshire with the low-intervention farming of Little Pomona’s partner orchards, things are rarely so certain for the common grapevine. It appears to grow well around the world, but this is often the sleight of hand of modern agriculture.

The Trousseau grapes for this wine - more common in its homeland of Jura, France - are part of a patchwork vineyard on Alder Springs Ranch, California, home to thirty-nine varieties of grapes planted on less than three per cent of its acreage. They are managed organically by Stuart Bewley and team, with sensitive farming prioritised over yields. Here, each grapevine gives enough fruit for a single bottle. Typical yields in California are from four to twenty times that amount. The vineyard is in Mendocino, in the north of the state, a few hills over from the Pacific, but still benefiting from its cooling influence for long, slow ripening. The wider ranch of more than five thousand acres is home to permanent woodland sequestering 65,000 tons of carbon per year.

With quantities so low, there is not much of this wine to go around. Yet to have a taste, we are also in competition with an unexpected adversary. According to the team at Edaphos, “the yield varies greatly due to being a favourite of the local bear population”. Happily, 2019 was not the bears’ year.

Joseph had long planned to follow a particular process with these Trousseau grapes, a fermentation of whole berries, called carbonic maceration. It is most commonly associated with Gamay grapes in Beaujolais, France, but also brings out the potential for headily perfumed wines from Trousseau whilst tempering their acidity. The whole bunches went into a Concrete Egg fermenting vessel - very much what it sounds like - and were sealed up for a month. This month of uncertainty was a test of faith, but the results were fantastic. The grapes were lightly pressed, and the wine finished fermenting and ageing in neutral oak casks. No sulphur dioxide was used at any point in the production or at bottling. 

Again, I urge you to discover this wine for yourself. The perfume and clarity of fruit speak for themselves, but I would also point to a savouriness that cuts against the bright strawberry and cherry; as the makers say, “a suggestion of salinity”. Let me know what you find.

For me, this shows a different, delicate side to the wines of the USA, one that I suspect has always been there, but has been drowned out by the furore around heavy-hitting wines in the nineties and oughts. The wines of Jura now have their own hype, but this wine does the variety and its unique Californian location proud.

David Byrne, speaking to Rick Carr on NPR, said of the song Once in a Lifetime: “We’re largely unconscious, you know… we operate half awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven't really stopped to ask ourselves, 'How did I get here?'”. For me, great drinks offer us the opportunity to be present, and to mark the moment that you get to know them.

Where will you be, when, who, how will you be, when you drink these drinks? And the same for the liquid, of course. Perhaps more importantly, what can these encounters teach us? Writer and Master Sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier suggests:

“More than ever, I believe that learning to taste is one of the solutions to mobilise and motivate us to change our consumption patterns and how we relate to our environment. Wine can contribute to this, as its tasting is so powerful, almost magical”.

I hope you enjoy meeting these drinks, I’m off to see some other friends in the fridge.