It’s a fresh, sunny afternoon in Amsterdam. The wind sweeps over the river IJ, and tiny droplets hit my cheeks as they’re blown up from the rocky river waves. Like Brits, the Dutch need only a hint of sunshine to take to the terrace of their kroeg—classic Dutch pubs—en masse, even if the foam from their beer might quite literally be blown into their faces. But at the moment I have somewhere else to be.

I am meeting my friend, Job Dejong, at Zuiver Wijnen, the Amsterdam-based natural wine distributor he works for. Tucked into a corner of Choux, this highly-acclaimed restaurant serves a set tasting menu and naturally made wines and other beverages, like home made juices and natural sake. When Zuiver opened 10 years ago, there wasn’t much natural wine in the Netherlands, so they started importing them.

At just 24 years old, Job’s achievements are already impressive. He has interned at the renowned natural wine domaine Matassa, currently works full-time for Zuiver, and on the side, has produced various vintages of his own wine and cider. He’s a kind soul, and speaks calmly, with a warm, Flemish accent.

Job and I talk while sitting on opposite sides of a high office desk, which doubles as a sales counter in the shop for take-out bottles of wine during the day. At night it transforms into a bar when the restaurant is fully booked.

Turning my head to the left, I am in a restaurant. I see bottles and jars filled with ferments, oil infusions lined on shelves, and service staff setting up the tables amongst them. When I turn my head to the right, I am in a wine shop, and there are neatly stacked rows of wine bottles from all over the European continent. One of those bottles is of specific interest to me today, and that is a bottle of cider.

***

This is a story about cider, but wine runs deeply through it. Job’s full-time passion lies in winemaking. His late father was one of the very few people in the Netherlands who owned a functioning vineyard. From a very young age, Job assisted his father in the process of winemaking. Tiny batches were made, some close to undrinkable, some passable, all of them enjoyed with friends. Since his father’s passing, Job has been taking care of the vines with the help of his brother and two sisters.

When Job’s older sister started working at Choux, he started to appreciate the taste of the natural wines she would let him try. She opened a wine shop, he worked there for a bit, and eventually landed his current role at Zuiver. In the meantime, Job continued the family tradition and experimented with fermenting their grapes.

“My days consist of processing orders and hosting tastings, mostly for professionals who want to buy wines for their restaurant,” he tells me.

“I did seriously consider whether I didn’t actually want to be on the other side of the product, making wines and working in natural vineyards. My boss recommended me to just go and try, and through their contacts I ended up interning at Matassa.”

For Job, his foray into the world of natural wine was an enlightening experience. “Honestly, it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. After a few days of immense physical challenges, I considered quitting,” he says. “We were picking grapes at five in the morning, before it got too hot, and then working in the cellar in the afternoon. But in the end the amazing mentorship—and home-cooked lunches—by Tom Lubbe made me decide to stay.”

““I considered quitting. We were picking grapes at five in the morning... But in the end the amazing mentorship—and home-cooked lunches—by Tom Lubbe made me decide to stay.””

— Job Dejong, Cidre Sauvage

His time at Domaine Matassa was a huge step in his career: it’s through the discussion of a bottle of their wine that he met his cider companion, Bonne Benschop, a vigneron from Limburg. This serendipitous conversation came about in 2021, in the form of a disagreement.

“There’s a hotelier school in Maastricht, and the city is rather drenched by a classic French style of cooking and hospitality,” Bonne says. “There, natural wine was still really very novel. So when one day a young man walks in and with conviction reaches for a bottle of Matassa, I knew he knew.”

Job, unwavering in his passion for the bottle in his hand, had disagreed with Bonne on the cuvée. “He asked me about [the cuvée], I stumbled over some varieties, and then he said he thought I was wrong. He then told me he had helped make it some years earlier.”

Despite this awkward hurdle, the two became friends—in fact, it is together with him that Job has been making some early vintages of Cidre Sauvage.

“The yield of grapes at the family vineyard is very low,” Job says. “Me and Bonne were both eager to learn more about fermenting and ageing processes, but we did not have so much fruit to work with.”

This is where their third friend, Reinier Hoon, enters the picture. A university teacher turned farmer taking care of organic and biodynamic farms in Limburg (and just across the border, in Belgium,) through his work, Reinier got in touch with many old farmers that own the typical Dutch high-stem fruit trees.

The older they are, the higher these trees grow, and therefore it becomes more difficult to pick their fruit. As their owners also grow older, this creates a very practical problem: the trees become too difficult for them to harvest. They are left with a glut of high-quality local apples, in need of young fit people to pick them. Reinier mentioned this problem to Bonne and Job, and so the first vintage of Cidre Sauvage was born.

***

In the Netherlands, wine and cider are not only intertwined when it comes to the makers, but also their consumers. Martijn de Wal, Dutch distributor of natural ciders since 2009, confirms this surprising symbiosis: “Since the boom in popularity of naturally made wines, the demand for naturally made ciders has grown too. I started my company because I myself enjoyed drinking a good Calvados,” he tells me.

On holidays in Brittany he visited some cider makers, and quickly learned one can’t live off Calvados alone.

“I started drinking good cider, but the cider available to me back home in the Netherlands was mostly a highly industrialised version of the product,” Martijn says. “I started importing as a hobby, selling to private aficionados and restaurants, and grew from there.”

“Since the last 10 or 15 years or so, people have come to learn the value of respectfully farmed fruit and spontaneous fermentation”.

The Netherlands is not a producing entity in the way France, the UK, or Spain is. This is not due to a lack of apples, of which there are many local varieties that are being cultivated, but rather due to an apparent lack of interest in the drink.

In cider-producing countries, the drink is often associated with harvest celebrations or other Pagan festivities. In the end, fermenting apples was a way to reduce waste and get a little drunk along the way. In the Netherlands people like Martijn, who appreciate its distinct flavour profiles, will go out of their way to import cider from other countries. Good imported cider in The Netherlands comes at higher prices, and is considered more of a gastronomic luxury.

Martijn’s ciders have been used in pairings in set menus, also at Choux. Is cider in the Netherlands then limited to gastronomically experienced consumers? Not entirely. When at six o’clock the first guests start to arrive at Choux, ready for their tasting menu, Job, our photographer Daphne, and I get on our bikes and set off to Café de Druif, ready to drink some cider in a pub setting.

***

De Druif is one of Amsterdam’s oldest bruine kroegen, the old style pubs of the city. It officially got its liquor licence in 1631, but had been around for many years before that. It used to be a distillery, the remnants of which remain in the barrels that line the pub’s walls. It owes its name to the bunches of grapes (druif meaning grape) that would hang on its façade, signalling its distillery function.

During the Dutch colonial expansion, De Druif was an embarkation café where sailors would register to board boats leading them to the colonial territories that encompassed present-day Indonesia and Malaysia.

Mass tourism means that longstanding neighbourhood bars in Amsterdam can be exploited more lucratively; you may see the queues of tourists blocking canal streets, waiting hours for a box of fries doused in grated truffle parmesan. No one wanted this to happen to the Druif. This is why, even with the latest change of ownership, generations of owners have tried to change as little as possible, keeping intact a time capsule in a city that has suffered rapid modernisation and loss of authenticity.

““Generations of owners have tried to change as little as possible, keeping intact a time capsule in a city that has suffered rapid modernisation and loss of authenticity.””

There is still no music, the same regulars decorate the bar chairs, and one can order the historic Dutch drunk snack from the bar—a plain hard-boiled egg, to be peeled and eaten cold from its shell.

One small change was made to the menu—the new owners added some artisanal drinks to the usual offering. Now at the Druif, one can always order a well-made cider by the glass. We open Job’s bottle, get two glasses of the Normandy cider (by Manoir de Montreuil, in the Normandy AOP Pays d’Auge), order some bitterballen (a typical Dutch deep-fried and breaded ball of veal ragù served with mustard) and prepare ourselves for a taste test.

Job’s cider is made from a blend of old Limburgian high-stem apples, from six different orchards. When I ask Job about the number of varieties used, he tells me it is difficult to say.

“There are so many local apples. There will be a tree in Eijsden, a village with less than 10,000 inhabitants, and they’ll proudly have their own apple variety called the “Eijsdener Klumpke” (“the little Eijsden clog”, as in, the Dutch folkloric wooden clogs).

Job will send me pictures later of the orchards (“a little blurry, I was on my racing bike,”) of the rows of high-stem apple trees in Eijsden, in full white blossom.

Fermentation of Job’s cider is spontaneous, and takes place at a low temperature. In 2023 he and Bonne experimented with making a batch that ripened in a barrel, next to their usual choice of stainless steel. In the end, they decided that actually the blend of both batches together created the most balanced product. No sulphites are added at any stage of the process.

Cidre Sauvage 2023 is a very dry, very fresh cider, with high levels of salinity and sharp citrus. The carbonation is gentle, and not so aggressive that it irritates the nose. With time and some air, it changes slowly into something more fruity and tropical, slightly richer.

The Normandy cider they serve at De Druif is made on a domain that has been run by the same family for 13 generations. It conforms with cider’s own AOP (Aréa de Origin Protégée) guidelines, meaning they are allowed to use 50 of a total of 750 available species. The AOP rules demand spontaneous fermentation, and excludes pasteurised ciders.

We smell something rustic and hay-like, something like blue cheese. Even though this is a “sec” or “dry” cider, and the domain also makes a demi-sec, the taste is full-on fruit, sweeter than the Cidre Sauvage. The natural carbonation is a bit stronger, even though this bottle was open before we drank from it.

We agree that the Dutch Cider, due to its acidity, is the better pairing for our deep-fried snack. Barman Ralph tells us that at De Druif, cider is a popular order. “It’s a pretty ideal drink: it doesn’t have the complicated aura nor the alcohol level that wine has, but it is fresher and will fill you up less than beer.” Job, with a mouthful of hot bitterbal, nods in agreement.

As the British writer (and Pellicle regular) Rachel Hendry once wrote of cider: “Is it wine? Is it beer? It is neither of course, how boring for cider to always have this asked of it, to be tugged between two drinks that don’t accurately represent or reflect its own history, nuances and agriculture.”

Good news for the Dutch that they are finally learning that too.