We met Tariq from Revel in Barcelona at Vella Terra and fell in love with both the ciders and the wines they are making in Ontario. They make incredibly tiny batches of all their wines and ciders so we were lucky to grab what we got and can't wait to add more new releases! Here is how he describes the project: Revel started as an obsession of mine, living on an organic vegetable farm named Manorun and falling in love with food and drink fermentation. In their outdoor kitchen, I made naturally fermented pickles, mulberry wine, and when the fall came, cider. With my own enthusiastic naiveté, our cidery's story begins. As time went by, we earnestly fell for our characterful native yeast fermentations. Now we let everything ferment with the organisms indigenous to the fruit and our cidery, impressing a sense of time and place on each harvest. Our fermentations have always been oxidative, more out of necessity than anything else. We couldn't afford stainless steel at the beginning, so we started with plastic and oak vessels. Learning to guide native yeast and bacteria with exclusively oxidative equipment has been an absorbing journey. Currently we age our ciders and wines on tannic apple pomace and grape marc, protecting them from oxygen while infusing texture and salinity. Letting our microorganisms breathe in their youth, and continually digest plant material as they age, gives us a vibrant expression of both fruit and animal life. We're truly proud of the bottles that leave our cidery and hope you enjoy drinking them as much as we enjoy making them.
