Katie and Matthew (Twin Island Cider) interview Tariq from Revel Cider/Ibi Wine.

This is a transcript of a Zoom call one Friday afternoon in August 2021, edited for length and clarity. Tariq Ahmed and his team have been producing natural cider and wine in Guelph, Ontario, using Ontario fruit since 2014. Photos via: Revel Cider

Katie: So can you tell us what the natural wine and cider scene looks like in Ontario right now?

Tariq: Well I wanted to answer this question from two different perspectives: from a producer’s perspective as well as a consumer’s perspective. It's still a pretty young scene—you have a couple heavy hitters for wines like Pearl Morissette and Rosewood, but most of what is happening in Ontario is still very conventional and as far as I know we're the only ones in Ontario making cider the way that we do, all spontaneous fermentation, no filtration or added sugar.

As far the cider scene goes I think there’s even less than wine—though there are significantly less cideries and wineries here too so that probably has something to do with it. I have seen though, since we've started making zero sugar ciders, there are other cideries offering that, at least, even if they are conventionally fermented, which is nice to see—

Matthew: —That’s very much a baby step in terms of people doing the same stuff as us though. I mean I don’t even call that a step! (laughs)

T: Absolutely, totally. From a drinker’s standpoint though I think the natural wine scene is pretty robust, and a lot of credit for that belongs to the Grape Witches, if you’ve heard of them—Nicole and Krysta have a wine shop in Toronto now, but they started a few years back doing these natural wine parties and educational events that I think had a massive influence on building the natural wine scene. Nicole’s family has a wine import company and as a result of that, she had been working through them to bring in more natural stuff, and she’s spun-off the import aspect into her own business now. 

But while there definitely is interest from drinkers in Ontario, I think it’s centred on the romantic aspect of wine that was made ‘somewhere else’. I don’t think local wine is necessarily as hyped as wine from other places. Which is cool, and we certainly take advantage of that the other way around as we export a fair bit. But I think this is a thing that happens across the world—where things that are local aren’t as romantic somehow. I shouldn’t shit on local drinkers at all though (laughs) because Toronto is where we sell most of our product ultimately. It’s Toronto, then Montreal, and then Guelph—so there certainly is a lot of local support. But I’ve talked to other local producers about this, and it feels like you haven’t made it locally until you’ve made it internationally, and then people start to really pay attention.

K: Like locals don’t know what they’ve got until people from other regions start taking an interest.

T: Yeah exactly. Covid as a whole though really pushed people to buy local, at least here. We got this massive bump in new customers who had never tried us before. It was that, along with the whole Suez Canal debacle that really encouraged people because they just couldn’t get wine from elsewhere as it was held up for months on end.

M: Wow—from the shipping blockage.

T: Yeah I heard this from a few different importers actually—we have one in New York who mentioned that as well as Canadian importers too. We were just like—well yes, we would love to sell you more product! So that was one funny thing that happened that I feel pretty good about (laughs), I guess you just take them where you can get them.

K: So when you started making grape wines—your wine label is called Ibi, right?—did that bring a whole new audience of drinkers or was it more like your fans were excited to branch out with you?

T: I think the answer is somewhere in the middle there. Certainly our fans were excited to try something new from us, and we launched Ibi right around when natural wine was becoming exciting. And I should say we’re not using 100% organic fruit—our grower for grapes has a sustainability certification from the Grape Growers of Ontario but he’s not certified organic.

K: Is it hard to find certified organic there?

T: It is yeah. It’s so humid out here that there are a lot of mold issues. People will spray sulfur or copper but ultimately those don’t always work. Even the main natural wineries like Pearl Morissette for example don’t use organic. I recently heard about a natural wine festival here that wouldn’t let some Ontario producers show up because they don’t source organic, so there was really no local wines represented at that natural wine festival.

But on the flip-side, with Ibi, we’ve had quite a few people discover Ibi through restaurants and then find out later “oh it’s Revel who’s making this wine”, and then they’re thrilled, because they didn’t know we made wine. So it’s cool to have a product kind of stand on its own, without having to do any additional marketing.

K: So I am also very interested in your price points, especially now that you have both wine and cider—have you found over the years that you’ve been able to push your cider pricing up to a point you’re happy with or is that something you’re still working on?

T: Yeah, so well it’s the same (laughs), a little of everything. I’m pretty happy with the price point we’re getting for our ciders now. For the more special stuff we’re charging around $25 a bottle and selling those direct to consumer which makes perfect sense for us—it lets us pay people well and have a benefits program and those kinds of things which I feel are important. But yeah, the wines are definitely higher margin because they get a higher price point, naturally—

K: Is that to do with purchased fruit pricing or just market expectations?

T: Yeah I think it’s mostly market expectations. Grapes are definitely more expensive than apples—for exciting, rare varieties of apples, thinking of cost per litre they’re about $2 per litre, whereas some of the grapes are like $4-$6 per litre. So certainly it’s not that much cheaper…it really does feel like it’s just market price points and what we’re just able to sell [cider versus wine] for. And actually we have reduced the prices of our wines this year. In the first year everything was foot stomped, we didn’t have a sorting table, we just had stainless tables we angled into a tank (laughs)…and it was very, very manual. So we had to charge for that. But after that first year we were able to buy a sorting table, buy a de-stemmer, and make this a little bit easier for ourselves also. So yeah it felt right to lower the price point because it didn’t cost as much to make at that point.

But yeah, overall I’m pretty happy. Cans however I would certainly like to be able to sell for a little bit more—we don’t have a canning line so all of our costs are inflated because we’re bringing a mobile canning company in. But it does feel like the right format for certain beverages and certain blends, so I don’t want to stop doing it, but we don’t ultimately make a whole lot of money on those.

K: Yeah it seems to be another like “what will people pay?” scenario where there’s an upper limit of what people are willing to pay for a product in can format…like they almost just can't conceive of a high quality product being in a can.

M: But also, we were anticipating BC wineries to start selling piquette in cans and it’s started happening this past year, and we didn’t know what their prices would be—and we were shocked to see piquettes on the shelves at like $8—

K: We love piquettes but yeah just the idea that it’s a secondary product, it has the same ABV as our cider in cans, and yet we’re seeing it at prices way higher than we could reasonably charge based on other canned ciders on store shelves right now. It’s like…ahhh!

M: Just a clear analogy for how the market values wine products versus cider. 

K: On the topic of grapes though, we’re planting out some hybrid grape vines in a new orchard and I wanted to ask if you’ve worked with any [north american] hybrid grapes?

T: Yeah we like hybrid grapes a lot. That’s a big chunk of what we do for our wines. 

K: Do you use them mostly for blending or…?

T: No we’re doing single varietals with them—we do use some in cans for blending with cider, but doing most single varieties with those.

K: That, I think, is a very cool frontier.

T: Yeah, it’s almost like rediscovering something because surely someone had that excitement when planting them fifty years ago, you know? When I went and worked with our hybrid grower he was like “what…you don’t just want to make boxed wine with these?” and I was like “No! You planted these vines fifty years ago, that’s insane—you don’t find that in Ontario or in any new wine region right? That’s really rare. And you also didn’t pull them out when the Canadian government was paying farmers to do that. So—oh my god yeah I want to use these and make them special.

K: It’s the same with apples, when you taste these old cider varieties grown on young, dwarf rootstock trees they just don’t taste great compared to when you find them grown on the full standard trees with older, more established root systems. It’s like no matter the variety, the age of the tree adds so much character.

T: Yep.

K: Getting back to cider though, I was also interested in getting your thoughts on how people’s perspectives have changed around dry, natural cider over the last five-or-so years.

T: Well, yeah, I mean I guess it’s a bit of both (laughs)…that same answer I keep giving you. There’s the people who say “this is totally different” or “this is too sour”, but I think it’s shifted more towards people being open to what we’re doing now, and maybe it’s also been a function of our comfort level and confidence in what we’re doing. Because we were pitching yeast in those first couple of years, and filtering and back-sweetening, and then after a couple years we only continued doing that for our flagship product, but everything else we were making was zero sugar, unfiltered, wild fermented, and it was like—okay, this is what we want and what we’re proud of. 

At that point in time, Revel was a two person operation—I had just hired my first staff person—and he came in and we tasted through everything—the pitched yeast tanks and the wild fermented tanks, and we both agreed the wild fermented ones were far better. And eventually we just said, you know what, we also just hate filtering (laughs). It’s a ton of work, it’s very expensive, and we felt like we were making worse product. So we just said, yes, sure this product that is filtered and back-sweetened is 400% of our revenue, but we’re just going to stop making it. And here’s this new product that’s aged on crabapple skins and is unfiltered and wild fermented and yeah…hopefully you guys like it, bars and restaurants, cause we’re not making that other thing anymore (laughs). And some of them dropped us, and some of them were stoked, and a whole lot of new people showed up too. And I was so stoked to be making stuff that we’re proud of, because it’s also just far easier to sell stuff that you like.

M: Do you find your bar and restaurant clients will just take whatever batch you want to throw at them now?

T: It’s been interesting to see them come back after covid, they’ve really just opened up in the last couple weeks, but yeah prior to that we would have a new keg every week or two, depending on how busy they were. And they were all gone within the course of a couple weeks and it was great—everyone just had rotating Revel lines. It was really allowed us to be creative. This is again even before we started doing bottles. We almost exclusively were doing kegs at the beginning, which definitely didn’t help margins at all—but I was also doing it by myself for a long time and you can’t really bottle by yourself. Covid was nice in that it just reset everything and I could just think, okay, if I could just do this all over again how would I do it? And yeah, direct to consumer makes so much more sense. I can’t stress enough how much this last year has helped us, at least, to discover what we want to be and do and make.

K: Find a niche. Yeah. Do you find some bars and restaurants are more open to the small batch concept now? For us, over time we’ve just kind of dropped those kind of wholesale customers who just want the same batch over and over again consistently because we don’t work that way.

T: We have a few restaurants like that. They’ll say “oh I thought this can would available…forever!” And you have to explain that sure, we try to make a lot each year, but sorry it’s an agricultural product and you also just can’t predict how much you’re going to sell over a year.

K: They literally just don’t want to change the menu (laughs).

T: Right. It is frustrating because some of those accounts have the most buying power. So it’s like, how can I convince you this makes sense? You do it with your food menu, food menus change seasonally, so why not with your beverages?

K: Okay so I included this next question because I really needed to hear somebody else talk about this because I was just ranting at Matthew about it: I came across an article by this UK cider critic who is starting to compile some sort of industry standard—he called it a “taxonomy of cider faults”—because he doesn’t like that there’s this mystery when you buy a bottle and don’t necessarily know what the profile is and what kind of “faults” it might have. And yeah…to me that’s defeating the whole purpose, when you start labelling things, like certain notes from brettanomyces, as a “fault”. It’s all so subjective. And just using the word “fault” without anybody looking deeper into that concept and what we really mean by it. Because really all of fermentation is a fault—it’s part of the natural process of food breaking down to return to the soil, and we just capture it at the perfect moment where it tastes great and has alcohol. So I just wanted to hear your opinion on whether there needs to be this sort of mass consensus on what everyone should label a “fault” and an “off” flavour.

T: Yeah…I’m all for more education, I think that’s a great thing and people should enjoy knowing more about their beverages, but going into it by describing certain flavours as faults or off-flavours is probably not the right way to go about it in my opinion. For me, I like brett character in ciders as well, and we have plenty of funky offerings. And I like a little bit of acetic acid in our ciders as well, ideally under 1%—that’s a sweet spot where it still lifts other aromatics and adds complexity without really tasting acetic—but that is a tough needle to thread sometimes. But I think when you can do that successfully, the products are better for it.

K: Well and like us you probably have people who just love and really “get” what you do and your cidermaking philosophy, and not every single cider you make is going to blow their minds—some batches might be a bit more polarizing than others—but they’re all a part of this bigger story that you’re telling each year, and your ongoing experimentation, and it changes every year. So you know, the people you really care about are those people who are into what you’re doing, they’re not those people buying a random bottle off the shelf and then being disappointed because it has a funky character they’re not used to.

And also from a personal drinking experience, we’ve tried so many different ciders on the market, and the only ciders we’ve literally dumped down the drain were ones that tasted dominantly like lab yeast, or like sugary fruit juice from concentrate or were just so flabby and boring. And none of those things would count as “faults” or “off flavours” through the academic lens that this cider critic is using. Matthew and I actually seek out bretty and funky French ciders, or acetic Spanich ciders, because we love those characters for pairing with certain foods, and no one can tell me “well your drinking faulty, off-flavoured cider”. It’s like really? This is what I enjoy, don’t tell me what to think. Taste is so personal.

T: Yeah. It is really funny to hear that someone is saying “we need this for cider” because it feels like the whole natural wine movement has been a response to this way of thinking—so here it is going back (laughs), I guess the pendulum is just constantly swinging back and forth. But that’s just it right—like you mentioned you’ve dumped stuff that tasted like lab yeast—absolutely—it’s like New Zealand Sauvignon blanc was a thing and it was exciting, and now Sauvignon blanc from anywhere in the world tastes like that because they figured out how to get a yeast to express that. 

I’ve gone to wineries and tasted stuff out of tanks and been like “oh you fermented this with X5 right?” and they’ve said “yeah that’s what we did”, because the yeast is so potent now that it’s easy to pick out. So okay, you’ve taken what’s completely special about any of these places and just steamrolled it. Well, that’s not exciting. And sure using lab yeast you’re going to have a consistent product but it’s literally the same product made anywhere just with different labels on it. Is that a world I want to live in? Not really. (laughs)

So yeah certainly you want a middle-ground—you don’t want to be buying bottles of vinegar because that doesn’t do good things for the industry—

K: Well and I would think most producers wouldn’t release something like that because you want people to buy your product again, so…

T: That’s just It, you know, that is the whole point of capitalism—to let markets decide what’s good and what isn’t, so why do you need to tell people what they should be enjoying or not. I can say there’s a lot of bad things about capitalism but this one thing about self-regulation of products, letting people decide for themselves what tastes good makes sense. 

K: (laughs) Okay, end of rant, getting back to Revel—what do the next five years look like for Revel and for Ibi? 

T: It is—oh man—I’m really stressed out about it actually, just because our lease is up in our current space at the end of November. So essentially if we want to stay here, we have to buy the building. It’s a lot of money and we didn’t qualify for a loan for that amount. So there’s some creative solutions we’re looking at including the owners letting us be equity partners in the building and allowing us to pay them off over time. That seems like it might work but if not, we’re looking at a very hectic harvest season where we’re moving I guess…which is not ideal. 

M: Yeah wow!

T: Yeah, so that’s the main thing. Obviously that’s not in five years, that’s in a few months. But…moving past that, I’ve always said I would love to have some land to plant fruit, and that is still something I would absolutely love to do. We’re currently growing most of the botanicals, we do forage still, but a lot of the botanicals we’ve just started growing behind our cidery here and that’s really fun. Kind of a way for us to get our feet wet in growing things, and that is actually what I went to school for—plant science—and I wanted to be farmer and started doing this thinking cidermaking would be a way into it and here we are, six or seven years later, and I still don’t have a farm (laughs). But hopefully within the next five years we can make that move.

What we’ve just realized is you can’t do anything if you aren’t actually making some money. We did quite well during covid, we’ve been able to buy some nicer equipment that has significantly improved our product, and that was really eye-opening. Prior to that I think Revel kind of operated as a hobby business as opposed to something trying to generate some revenue. And it was like, oh...this is a way more fun hobby if you actually have the funds to buy what you need and you’re not always worried about a wrench or whatever, right? Or you can hire people to help so you’re not so burnt out trying to do everything yourself (laughs), so yeah there is some impetus to run a successful business.

So if we can buy this building we’ll open a tasting room out front, and hire a few more people. That feels special because I also want to continue to have that direct relationship with the people drinking our products. When we started we were exclusively selling to bars and restaurants and we really didn’t know who was drinking our products. We had no relationship with those people. So doing the online shop has been great for that, but also having a physical space where we can talk to them over the counter…that is a special relationship. 

Get your hands on Revel Cider (shipping across canada), or follow them on IG.

Much gratitude to Tariq for spending time with us!

—> Return to Cider Folk Issue 2 here