Vigo press & crusher demonstrated by Bob Flowerdew on Gardeners’ World BBC TV:

“Autumn is the season of apples – the ideal crop for the busy gardener, vast quantities, requiring almost no attention. But you can only store and eat so many … All over the country apples are going to lie under the trees and rot. I have the answer … You can make your own lovely pure, maybe organic, juice …

Look at the lovely colour – the taste is delicious. Preserve the juice in either wax cartons or plastic bottles and put it in your freezer. But apple juice doesn’t actually go off – it turns to cider, that’s not such a bad thing either! Lovely stuff!”

Andrew Blackford in The Kitchen Garden:

If you’ve never pressed apples before, you’d never believe they could surrender so much juice: 50 per cent or more of their weight if you are lucky.

Our juice was an education: its colour, a deep brown, was far darker than the stuff bought in cartons and its scrumptious, full bodied flavour put the commercial offerings in the shade, too. Our home-pressed product was far “apple-ier”, we agreed. Resisting the temptation to enjoy it as juice, we risked all on our cider-making enterprise. So what does it taste like? “Robust, challenging, but decidedly drinkable.”

Article in the Guardian by Dr Stephan Buczacki:

“Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of apples was carted to the compost heap. Our salvation came last year with one of my most valuable acquisitions for many a day: a fruit press. No apple is now wasted, for they all go through the slicer and into the press, emerging the other side as beautiful apple juice, to be frozen quickly so that it will then last all year … Our press came from Vigo Limited”

Pamela Deschamps in The Kitchen Garden:

“I had never used a fruit steamer but it is a simple clean operation which quickly converts soft fruits into delicious drink concentrates which set your taste buds tingling”.

Article in the Independent by Duff Hart-Davis:

‘The arrival, via Father Christmas, of juice-pressing equipment has given our household a new dimension. At first I looked askance at the sturdy little press, like a barrel, with its green enamelled iron and upright oak staves set slightly apart. The device was made in Hungary and seemed rather primitive, the sort of thing that peasants use: was there not some more modern electrically driven equivalent?

My reservations proved ill-founded, for the press not only works beautifully but is great fun to operate. Over the New Year we collected up a few cider apples which had got left in the grass beneath the trees, gave them a perfunctory wash and fed them into the grinder which sits on the top of the press. After a minute or two the juice began to ooze out between the slats, and suddenly, with a couple more turns of the screw a rush of it burst out all around, running down into the collecting channel at the bottom and out into the waiting bucket. It was perfectly delicious, its almost overpowering sweetness tempered by a fresh natural edge such as one never finds in commercial products.

The first production did not last long. It was so good that we showed off by offering it to guests, who downed it by the pint...

A great truth has dawned on us: that almost any home-grown fruit, in its due season, can be profitably squeezed... Never again will we leave a surplus crop lying on the ground...it is particularly gratifying to be able to say to a visitor, “Do have some apple juice – it’s home-made.”