Delicious ice cider

Jean-François Ritt, owner of the Domaine Ritt in Cap-Saint-Ignace, and Mélanie Girard, professor at ITAQ, explain the two methods used to make ice cider.

TRANSCRIPT

[A guitar plays―It’s winter, and Jean-François Ritt is walking through the snow to get to the tanks, which are stacked and covered with wire mesh. He provides explanations, standing next to the tanks]

So here, in these tanks, we have our apple juice that is being frozen. Um… that will, that will, through this process of cryoconcentration, produce ice cider. 

So, through the action of freezing, the apple juice will become concentrated in sugar and aromas.This concentrated apple juice will then be fermented for over six months  in our tanks in order to produce our famous ice cider. 

 [Close-up of the tanks]

[A change of location and season, Mélanie Girard stands in front of a building and explains what is happening there]

It’s important to know that freezing is essential in ice cider that the water in the apples or juice can rise to the surface during freezing. 

So, two main manufacturing processes are used in ice cider. Either we’ll use the juice pressed in December, that will be placed outside. Or we’ll extract the juice from the apples directly, that we’ll press some more in February. 

The procedure for concentrating the sugar is just about the same. I’d say that during, Um… in the juice, the water contained in the juice will simply rise to the top due to density, and freeze. 

Then, when we’re ready to start fermentation, we just extract the apple juice concentrate from the bottom of the tank. 

The other method is to extract the highly concentrated apple juice from the apple itself, but the cold process used during the winter will have done the same thing, will have dried the apples directly on the trees.

Therefore, all that’s collected at the end is the juice concentrate,

[View of the trees in the Domaine Ritt orchard in winter]

and the aromas that are concentrated during this process.