Agreed with DrunkleJon, plus the juice alone probably had enough sugar to get to 6-7% ABV on its own.
Agreed. Most juice/cider tends to be in the 1.040-1.050 range all on it's own, but it is almost completely fermentable and a cider/beer yeast strain is going to be able to eat all of the simple sugars, so it'll likely ferment down to around .970-.980 range (because alcohol is lighter than water, it reduces the gravity to below that of water). A wine yeast strain would likely not be able to eat all of the sugar in apple juice as it can only eat the most simple of sugars (which is why it is used in wine, so that you have some residual sugar, instead of the yeast eating every last bit of sugar. 100% fermented apple juice or 100% fermented grape juice doesn't taste very good, which is why people back sweeten hard cider and then pasturize it. For wine, they use very low attenuating strains that cannot eat all of the sugars beyond the most simple of them).
It'll take weeks and weeks to eat something that high an ABV with low nutrients present. If you were dosing with nutrients at maybe 24hrs, 72hrs and 1 week, it might be able to ferment out in 3-4wks. Maybe.
Look at mead, it takes the better part of a year to ferment out mead that is in the same range as the hard cider you just made. If you do some heavy and regular dosing of yeast nutrients you can speed it up, but you are still talking at best 8-12 weeks for something that is mostly drinkable.
Hard cider without ANY sugar addition is generally 4-5 weeks, with sugar closer to 2 months. Some of it is the actual ethanol production, but some of it is the other bits of fermentation, like cleaning up fermentation by-products that can take the yeast weeks after initial fermentation.
A nice nutrient packed source like beer can take only a week or so to ferment and be cleaned up for a low alcohol 4-5% beer, maybe 2 weeks for something in the 5-8% range and around 3-4 months for something up to around 10%. Much above that and you are talking a few months.
A lot of that is yeast stress. Even on a 10% ABV beer, the yeast has probably converted 80% of the sugar that it ever will munch to ethanol within the first 48-72hrs, but then it slows way down. I might even be completely done within one week, but it takes WEEKS, many plural sometimes, to finish converting by products AND also to age properly. Even if it has converted all of the by products there are still other chemical processes going on that make it "cleaner".
A good barley wine is likely to have to age for 6-12 months before it is hitting its prime, and it still might be better out at 3-4 years than it was at 1 year. A good RIS might hit its peak at 6-12 months too, but could still be better years later.
My local homebrew club one of the founding members gets Brooklyn Chocolate Stout every year (cases and cases of it when they release it). Every year he has a tasting of the different year's batches. The batches themselves DO have the recipe tweaked a little, but minor. There is quite a bit of taste difference between each years batch and we've generally seemed to have settled on the 3 or 4 year old Chocolate Stout being the best (it is 10% ABV IIRC), and that has been over the last couple of years, so it is almost as much about age as it is slight changes to their recipe (because if one year it is the 4 year old stout and the next year it is the 4 year old stout, they were slightly tweaked recipes, but it is the age bringing out the best qualities).
That doesn't mean you can't have good beer or cider in just a couple of weeks, but the higher ABV you go, no matter WHAT you do, the longer it is going to take to get good beer/cider.
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