The year is 2058. An Abba Voyage-style hologram of Chris Tarrant leans across to ask a near-retirement-age Gen Z contestant the all-important £10m question (skyrocketing inflation in the late 2020s forced up the prize pot).
“What is the name given to an alcoholic beverage fermented from the juice of pears?”
The contestant pauses, regretting the earlier use of their ‘FaceTime a Friend’ lifeline, before answering hesitantly: “Is it pear cider?”
“Congratulations, you’ve just won ten million pounds,” says almost-Tarrant.
The contestant slumps in relief, unaware that they owe their small personal fortune to Herefordshire cidermaker Westons deciding to declare the ‘death of perry’ some 33 years earlier.
But, back in the present day, why would one of Britain’s leading independent cider and perry producers decide this? And more importantly, are they right?
Perry’s rich history
First produced in Roman times, perry enjoyed a brief heyday as a rival to wine in the 17th century. At one stage, the drink was said to be a favourite of Napoleon Bonaparte, who reportedly anointed it “the champagne of the English”.
Although modern agricultural techniques and widespread orchard destruction caused production to decline significantly in the 20th century, perry enjoyed a comeback in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to the iconic sparkling Babycham.
Fast forward to today, and – on the face of it – perry has all the credentials to be a smash hit among Gen Z drinkers. It’s sweet, fruity, lower in alcohol than wine, and steeped in history.
According to Westons, though, there’s just one problem.
“People didn’t know what perry meant,” Westons head of business development Darryl Hinksman told The Grocer last week. “We were constantly having to explain that perry is a cider-type drink made from perry pears, but you can actually make perry from any pears. We do use perry pears but we also use conference and comice pears as well.”
A simple solution
Westons’ solution to this conundrum was a simple one. Last February, it re-badged its Henry Westons Vintage Perry as Vintage Pear.
Positioning the drink as a pear cider instead of a perry was about “rejuvenating the product to make it appeal to younger people and bringing it properly into the Henry Westons family”, Hinksman said. Westons also made the drink sweeter and lowered its abv to 6%.
Of course, it’s still early days, and the shiny new Vintage Pear is likely to have received a significant uplift in marketing investment. But so far, the rebrand looks to have been a success – sales are up a whopping 488% to £660k [NIQ 52 we 19 April 2025].
In an age of short consumer attention spans, where brands have a matter of seconds to stand out on shelf, demystifying perry has tempted some shoppers who might otherwise have overlooked the tipple.
A sign of the times
However, it’s hard not to feel a pang of sadness when a brand that likes to shout loud and proud about its rich heritage of authentic cider production turns its back on such a historic term.
For some, this is simply a sign of the times. “It seems like you have to even emphasise the apple in cider these days,” says former Hawkes Cider founder Simon Wright. “So perry doesn’t stand a chance.”
But surely educating consumers, and encouraging them to discover perry for themselves, is part of Westons’ responsibility as a custodian of cider? As another artisanal cidermaker put it to me last week: “In a subtle but not so subtle way, it shows how Westons are trying to be all things to all people, and ending up in a directionless scramble for cash.”
Others have gone further still with their criticism. “The decision to abandon the term perry is not just a marketing strategy. It is a deliberate severing of ties with centuries of English and European heritage,” rages Barry Masterson in an impassioned editorial for Cider Review. By discarding the perry name, Westons is “turning its back on its own roots and those of the entire regional tradition”, he argues.
But perhaps such doe-eyed romanticism misses the point. People are still drinking perry, with UK off-trade sales worth around £50m annually by Westons’ own estimates. It’s just that a business which hopes to hit £150m in annual revenues in the coming years has decided those lofty ambitions are best served by calling its perry something else.
And as Wright points out: “The craft producers will keep using the term perry and, if anything, it will clearly differentiate them from the mass producers.”
So perhaps the death knell for perry needn’t be sounded – nor hologram Chris Tarrant programmed – just yet.
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