Martin Moran, a Master of Wine writing about wine in the Sunday Times, (@winerepublic) switched his attention to Irish Cider recently and we are thrilled to see our Traditional Dry Cider listed Number Two on his recommended list of six.

Scoring 93 out of 100, just two points behind his top recommended cider, Martin describes our Traditional Dry Cider as: “Fresh red apple rather than cooked aromas making it more like wine with a bite of tannin, juiciness and acidity. Beautiful balance”.

In the Sunday Food feature titled “Crafty alternatives to sickly sweet diabetes in a glass ciders”, Martin describes the roaring success of Irish cider and says that cider’s market share is now about 10 per cent compared to the three per cent it was two decades ago.

He defines his take on ‘real cider’ and describes it as “simply fermented apple juice” and says he wonders why anyone would make it any other way. In his article he states: “Sadly, most of the stuff being drunk is the industrial beverage sweetened to such a degree that I dub it ‘diabetes in a glass’.”

The popular wine writer says the only good thing about what he calls ‘the fake cider’ boom is that it has created a demand for an authentic product and says thankfully there are now several new producers making the good stuff.

We of course are the latter and are proud of all of our ciders produced here at our orchards in Ardress in County Armagh – Ireland’s apple capital.

Our Traditional Dry Cider this year was named as a Gold Medal winner at the International Brewing and Cider Awards in London and was awarded recently by the National Trust as a produce winner in the Fine Farm Food Awards announced on Countryfile Live at Blenheim Palace.

We are thrilled that Martin likes our Traditional Dry Cider and to see it featured as second on his recommended list is pretty cool.

Our Traditional Dry Cider, along with our Medium Cider, were named winners at Blenheim Palace this year in the National Trust’s Fine Farm Food Produce Awards 2017 which were announced at Countryfile Live.

It’s fantastic to see our ciders getting such recognition.

We are delighted Martin Moran listed our cider.

Thanks Martin!