Fruit wine-specialist Rebello, owned by husband and wife duo Matt and Ruth Gallace, has been producing Cheeky Rascal cider for just over a year. Such is Rebello’s reputation that when it became known the company would be producing cider, its trial run of 1000 litres sold out before it’d even been bottled.
Realising there was real demand for the product, the company invested in several 45,000-litre tanks to increase production. It’s next batch – five times the size of the previous one – again sold out before production was finished.
The company has experienced 880 per cent growth in the last year and now has customers in every state of Australia, including Coles and Woolworths.
Point of difference
Matt is a third-generation Sunny Ridge strawberry farmer and the couple’s winery is based on the same 350 acres of Mornington Peninsula farmland that his father, and grandfather before him, have grown strawberries on for years. The family produced strawberry wine as a small side business until 2005, when Matt and Ruth brought the business and changed its name to Rebello, a play on the Italian word for rebel.
Having won multiple awards for its fruit wines, the pair are now using this experience to create a unique cider product. Cheeky Rascal’s unique selling point is that it is Australia’s first cider to be made with 100 per cent fresh fruit and no concentrates, flavourings or colours. There are seven variants: Apple; Pear; Strawberry Apple; Strawberry Pear; Raspberry Apple; Raspberry Pear; and the recently launched Summerberry, which is made of strawberry, raspberry and blueberry wines, blended with a pear cider.
Production
To produce the cider, Rebello uses high-sugar apples such as Pink Lady, Granny Smith, and Fuji sourced from Victoria rather than fruit concentrate as most mainstream cider producers do. These are pressed and the juices fermented then blended with fruit wines made with berries sourced from the family farm.
Based on appearance and packaging, cider tends to be more closely aligned with beer than wine, however, Matt explains that the cider-making process is very similar to making a sparkling wine or a rosé.
“It’s pretty much the same in terms of production capabilities and equipment required,” he says. “With beer you’re brewing, but with cider and wine, you’re fermenting a fruit and using yeast in the same way.”
There are other wineries in Australia that have branched out into cider, such as Puntroad Wines, which create Napolean Cider, or Bress Wines, which produces Bress Cider. There is, however, to the Gallace’s knowledge, only one other company in the world that uses the same production techniques and that is New Zealand’s Old Mount Cider, which specialises in cider blended with boysenberry wine.
The couple’s expertise in fruit wines and fruit varieties is essential for them to be able to produce a consistent product year-round because of the seasonal nature of fruit, which can vary in flavour, colour, acidity and sugar content. The flavourings in most ciders mask the natural fruit characteristics, but Cheeky Rascal, made only of fresh fruit, requires a delicate blending of different amounts of strawberries and raspberries to create the same product.
“I think blending is actually one of our greatest strengths. We’re very selective in the varieties of fruit we use because we have to make sure the characteristics of each marry up,” Ruth says. “Using only fresh fruit makes a tremendous difference with the taste, just compare eating a fresh strawberry with eating a strawberry lollipop, that’s the absolute difference in the flavour.”
Their purist production methods appear to be paying dividends and Cheeky Rascal has been awarded the People’s Choice award at Melbourne’s Fed Square Microbreweries Showcase, Best Commercial Cider at the Perth Royal Show and medals at the Australian Fruit Wine Shows in Hobart and Cairns.
Of course, it’s more expensive to produce cider with 100 per cent fresh fruit. At a retail level, Cheeky Rascal is approximately 10 per cent more expensive than mainstream ciders such as Bulmers and Magners, and of a similar price to other boutique ciders.
“From my understanding of our production costs, we’re working with pricing models that are more in line with wine,” Ruth says. “Sometimes, when we discuss the business model, people think we’re a bit mad, but we’re making it work.”
Growth strategy
Cider now makes up 90 per cent of Rebello’s sales and, having achieved national distribution, Ruth, who deals with the marketing, is keen to raise Cheeky Rascal’s profile. She believes the quality of the product speaks for itself and says the conversion rate when people taste the product is over 80 per cent. She says she isn’t fazed by being up against the likes of Foster’s and other big players in the category with major marketing clout.
“Each time I drive past an enormous cider billboard, I just think they’re helping to grow the category,” she says. “They might have phenomenal marketing budgets but we’ve got a pretty unique product and hopefully people will explore the different options and like Cheeky Rascal as well.”
