Cider for summer, and its low-cal come-on

Yep, it’s totally official. We’ve reached the tipping point on so-called “skinny” margaritas: Hungry Girl’s 115-calorie margarita. Skinnygirl’s 100-calorie pre-mixed version. Applebee’s sassy 100-calorie SkinnyBee Margarita.

Last week, I received a news release from Chi-Chi’s restaurant chain announcing its ready-made Skinny Margarita, doing Skinnygirl and SkinnyBee a whole five calories better, at 95 per serving.

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(Deb Lindsey/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) - Comte Louis de Lauriston Cidre Bouche Brut has a crisp flavor.

Numerous times in the past, I’ve poked fun at, and holes in, the whole skinny cocktail movement; check the Food section’s All We Can Eat blog archives for my rants.

With a sigh, I’m telling you that the Diet Police’s incursion into cocktails has sapped a bit of the fun from margaritas. It’s a shame, because that cocktail is one of my go-to hot-weather drinks. So as summer approaches, I’ve been searching for something, you know, less skinny-fied. This search has led me in an odd, counterintuitive direction, but I think I’ve found my early summer drink: cider.

Wait, you say. . . cider? Yes, I know. Made from fermented apples, cider seems a rather non-summer-seeming drink. But stick with me here. I mean, there’s no particular reason cider should only be drunk in autumn. Pinot grigio grapes, like apples, are also harvested in the fall, but you drink that stuff chilled all summer long.

As it happens, few weeks ago, I was in Asturias, a region in northern Spain, in a cool coastal city called Gijon. In Asturias, sidra (cider) is religion, as important as wine is in other regions of Spain. Because I absolutely love the stuff, it was like nirvana, and I sampled plenty of the local varieties.

In Gijon, you order sidra by the liter in bars called sidrerias, or cider houses. Then, with amazing skill, bartenders or waiters will pour out the cider in a long stream, holding the bottle high over their heads and splashing a little bit down into a glass held at waist level. You are served a couple fingers of the agitated, cloudy cider, which you are then expected to drink in one gulp. Salud!

“You will never see a region anywhere else where people drink so much cider,” said Jose Luis Roza, commercial director at Trabanco, the cider producer I visited near Gijon during my visit. “The Spanish economy is terrible, but the cider houses in Asturias are full.”

In America, we refer to real cider as “hard cider,” a term I hate. Cider is cider. The stuff with no alcohol is the exception and maybe should be called “soft cider.”

Asturian cider is extremely dry, with pleasant funk on the nose and serious acidity on the finish. It is unlike a good deal of ciders we see in the United States, such as Woodchuck or Strongbow.

“In Asturias, if you get a sweet cider, you send it back,” Roza said.

So while you can find brands such as Trabanco in the United States if you look hard enough, why don’t we see more Asturian cider in the United States? One reason is that more than 90 percent is consumed in Asturias. In fact, until a decade ago, most brands didn’t even put a label on the bottle. Trabanco was the first.