Sidra and the passage north


 We are heading out of town - the market stretches down along here - and, as we are by the El Gallineru Casa de Comidas lets pop in. Never the best of signs, the link on google to the menu is broken, but it is open 11am to 12pm every day but Wednesday and it gets 4,2 stars from almost 1700 reviews.   Google handily picks out key words. Cachopo gets 88 hits, cider 69, picnic tables 50, garden 38 and cabrales cheese 22.  I clicked on cachopo and got this from two days ago ‘Excellent attention and professionalism. Very delicious food and the cachopo of agárrate the males. You have to come very hungry. Excellent guys, it has been a pleasure. Congratulations to the waiter (Pepe) for being so kind and attentive. We will be back.’



Leopard 2 Espana recommended ‘Arroz Con Leche, Patatas Al Cabrales, Cachopo de Ternera Especial’



It is time to talk cider.  We are about to pass Sidra El Gaitero. This combines two Asturian lives, cider and bag pipes.  It is a manufacturer of cider and does factory tours - although I have never been in.





Cider and I have had a productive working relationship since I started going to reenment events and worked out I could afford to drink if I took my own cider with me.  There is something magical about how the yeasts on the apple skin will turn the juice into alcohol. The taste of freshly squeezed apples has a rich, velvet completeness which is to be relished.  Nava has a cider museum https://museodelasidra.com/en/  They make cider there. The place smells of apples. It is devine.




Asturias is obvious cider country.  The limited land available for cereals, the rain and the sun and places apple trees will grow make it a natural. Mechanisation has probably intensified production but reduced its coverage.  The advent of milk tankers, which couldn’t access the most mountainous of farms meant that less dairy cattle were kept high up.  Likewise the decline of small scale farming means many cider trees have been allowed to become leggy and decay.






El Gaitero https://www.sidraelgaitero.com/en/home/ make cider champagne and exported it to expats in South America.  In 1888 brothers Alberto and Eladio del Valle, financed by Bernardo de la Ballina and Ángel Fernández, acquired the machinery to begin production of ‘champagne cider’ in the borough of Villaviciosa. The company expanded in the 1950s and produce 27 million litres of the stuff a year.





Yesterday Aurora wrote ‘I've been in Villaviciosa all my life, and I loved going to see the Gaitero, something that being from the town, I never went until the other day, when the truth is, the girl Dolores, very nice, and Eva too, the other Elvira good but very Robotics, and I am from the town, by the way, daughter of the Rodaos, when my family comes from Italy, we will go see it, thank you, Dolores, and Eva’




Let us continue, carefully putting one foot in from of the other and so, enjoy the views of the estuary.




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