I’m going to put three glasses in front of you, and we don’t have long so you’ll have to taste them quickly.

The scent of the first is spun from gossamer. It is lemon-skin warmed in Sicilian splendour, but it is also a walk down the old Woolworth’s pick’n’mix aisle at the start of the day when everything’s still available, (and no one’s around to see if you pinch one.)

The second is voluptuous; the bursting of stone fruits, the platonic ideal of juiciness, scored through with nibbling acid; the high-toned lilt of a single violin in an orchestra of cellos.

Then the third. God, how can I put this? It is immense. It hulks and broods and growls and rumbles. It is at once, in the best of ways, the ooze of caramel and the muscular earthiness of autumn-mulched leaves. The brusque roughness of pearskin and the rising breath of rainwater off rock after a storm. It grips and booms; it doesn’t taste made, it tastes forged.

There is no single thread of flavour that binds these drinks. They are utterly apart; originals; without a like-for-like. All are perries, all are sublime, and all are just one medium-sized storm away from extinction.

***

Two thousand years ago, give or take a few decades, a man called Pliny the Elder wrote about a pear called the Falernian. It was so-called not because of where it came from, but because of ‘the liquor it affords,’ which he likened to Falernian wine—the best available to ancient Rome. That’s the earliest record we have for perry: fermented drink made like wine or cider but from pears.

Its fortunes, since then, have been mixed. What we know of its first thousand years could be written on the back of a heavily-used napkin. The records are mainly French, mainly ecclesiastical and mainly allude to something drunk at least partially as penance. Charlemagne liked it—he called it piratium—but no more than cider or beer and certainly less than wine.

The last millennium was busier. It might surprise readers of this publication to know that it was once more popular in Bavaria than beer, if not for terribly long. It had a heydey in 17th century Britain when wine was hard to come by. Contrary to popular belief Napoleon probably didn’t call it ‘the champagne of the English,’ but it was certainly commonly used by unscrupulous wine merchants to pad out bottles labelled wine or champagne.

It was made as a staple of rural life right across Europe, mostly around the line where wine gives way to beer. The Swiss grew a pear reputed to be so fine that English writers called it the best for perry in the world. Perry pears were shipped to America; grown by the million in France, Germany, Austria, Britain, Switzerland and countries besides.

What’s left today? Generously, a husk. In the last century pear trees have been obliterated by the thousand in every country that grew them; torn out, burned down and sometimes blown up with dynamite. Governments have mandated it, the EU financed it and the mechanisation of agriculture in the 1950s gave it impetus.

Austria’s Mostviertel had a million pear trees in the 1930s, now it has about 200,000. Normandy’s Domfrontais had one and a half million, now it has 150,000. Switzerland had 16 million fruit trees—probably more perry pear trees than anywhere on earth. But they ripped out 11 million in 25 years and now only two perrymakers I know of still work there.

““Perry isn’t a monolith. It isn’t a joke; something nostalgic and twee. It is its own whole, complex, vibrant, messy, detailed category.””

— Adam Wells

In the UK the story is the same, but no one cares enough to have kept a count, and by 1985 the Conservative Government had removed all research funding from the Long Ashton Research Station, the only place that might have.

These days there is so little perry made, so little known about it, and so few people who care that we pass down lies and generalisations and they stick. We say that it’s always sweet: it isn’t. We say that it’s always light—that’s not true either. We ho-ho about pears containing sorbitol and claim perry is a laxative—if that was true I’d be a ghost.

We equate the whole, broad, fascinating flavour spectrum of a labyrinthine, spellbinding drink to Babycham and Lambrini, and wise, sensible people—people who know and care deeply about other drinks—nod and shrug and pass the lies along. At best, perry has been filed as a sidekick; a chapter in a book about cider.

***

There is no drink in the world like perry. You can make it from any pears but most of the best is made from vicious, tannic, acidic, misshapen fruits called ‘perry pears,’ some so inedible that even pigs reject them. They grow mainly in the West Midlands and Wales, in France’s Normandy and in Austria’s Mostviertel, their varieties number thousands and each has a different flavour.

They grow on trees that can age over three hundred years and grow sixty feet tall with fifty-foot canopies; that at their largest hold over a tonne of fruit. Their drink is harder to make, takes more care, than cider—but the best examples are the match of anything ever fermented.

There are perries that are still and perries that sparkle in any number of ways; from pét-nats to Prosecco’s charmat method, even Champagne’s méthode traditionnelle. There are perries sumptuous as nectar and huge, hefty perries all tannin and grandeur that want pairing with roasts or steaks.

Perry isn’t a monolith. It isn’t a joke; something nostalgic and twee. It is its own whole, complex, vibrant, messy, detailed category; a world of texture and flavour that is hard won and deserves the dignity of recognition.

In fact it needs it. Those three glasses I put in front of you? They are Coppy, Betty Prosser, and Flakey Bark and there aren’t twenty mature trees left between them. Flakey Bark has six. Coppy has one.

I don’t know if I can make the case for perry in 1000 words, but they can make it in a sip. If you let them. If you seek them out. If you give perry the chance it deserves.