Pomme Blushe starts with an orchard rather than a marketing meeting. In 2003, founder Helen Benedict and her family took over a farm in West Dorset, close to the Jurassic Coast, and set about restoring the land. Part of that meant bringing an old orchard back to life, replanting it with 24 different varieties of fruit trees. By 2009 they were pressing their own apples and selling the juice to local artisan shops, but over time Helen began thinking about what else those apples could become. The result was Pomme Blushe, an English apple aperitif designed to give one of Britain’s most familiar fruits a completely different role.
Made using traditional bittersweet apples and produced seasonally, Pomme Blushe is blended and matured to create a smooth, fruit-forward aperitif at 12% ABV. It has a distinctive deep blush colour, plenty of fresh apple on the nose and a combination of natural sweetness, acidity and gentle bitterness that keeps it refreshing rather than cloying. The apple is very much the star here. There’s no attempt to disguise it beneath a mountain of botanicals or turn it into something unnecessarily complicated. It tastes recognisably of the orchard it came from, just in a rather more grown-up form.
That simplicity also makes Pomme Blushe incredibly easy to drink. Pour it over ice and it works perfectly well on its own, but its natural home is arguably in a spritz. The brand's signature serve combines three parts Pomme Blushe, two parts Prosecco and one part soda, finished with fresh apple. It gives the familiar spritz format a distinctly English character and offers something different from the orange and bitter-led aperitifs that have dominated the category for years. It also works beautifully with ginger ale, lemonade or as a base for more adventurous cocktails.
What makes Pomme Blushe particularly interesting is that the story behind it isn’t something that has been added afterwards. The orchard came first. Helen and her family had already spent years growing and pressing apples before the idea of turning them into an aperitif developed. Today, the brand remains rooted in West Dorset and works with heritage English apples from orchards across Dorset and Somerset, bringing a genuinely local story to a category still largely associated with continental Europe.
At its heart, Pomme Blushe is a very British take on aperitivo drinking: relaxed, uncomplicated and built around something we grow exceptionally well here. It takes the humble English apple and gives it a place at the beginning of the evening rather than at the bottom of a crumble. Serve it cold, add ice or bubbles, and suddenly Dorset doesn’t feel quite so far from the Mediterranean.
