Style: Semi-dry
Producer: Talavas sidrs SIA
Origin: Latvia
Size: 75cl
Alcohol: 4.8%
Price: 99kr
Systembolaget: 12128
When picking the ciders for this tasting, I came across one major problem: a lot of the cider available on the Swedish market are very similar to each other. I knew I didn’t want to do a tasting with eight ciders that were only fractionally different from each other. My aim was to find ciders from all different countries, so I was happy when I stumbled upon this! A rosé cider from Latvia was exactly what I needed to kick off the tasting and to help showcase the variety of different ciders that can be found in the world today. Talavas Sidrs was founded in 2014 and the cidery is located in the town of Gulbene in northern Latvia. The apple juice is fermented with champagne yeast for nine months in a steel tank at low temperatures. The cider has been flavoured with cherries and the apples were harvested by hand.
Pink to amber orange in colour, this cider had a medium to high carbonation when poured and seemed to have a slight haze to it. On the nose, the bittersweet red apple note came through well, but there wasn’t a sign of the cherries that had been used in the production of this cider. Once sipped, the cherry presence did become stronger, but never really came through as much as I liked. The crisp sweet apple blended with hints of yeast and filled the palate nicely. The aftertaste was shorter than I hoped, and was a bit of a letdown.
This was nice, but I’ve had much better rosé cider in the past couple of years, such as Stassen from Belgium. The price was off-putting too for what you get. If I was given this I would gladly drink it, but I don’t think I would go out and buy this again.