Discover Why We Made the Scary Leap into Cidermaking
Cidermakers and Orchardists
This is the question we get asked all. the. time. Why did you start the cidery and start cidermaking?
So there we were. Just moved to the US from the UK. (preface: Gary is from Ireland, we met in London, where we lived/married/had kids together for 10 years; travelled to many of the great European cider regions). We went to the store to buy the cider we were used to drinking in the UK – full of tannin/flavour/not a lot of sugar – and BOOM, no where to be found. We missed it. A lot.
We bought local apples and local juice and tried to ferment our own in our garage. Not the same. We needed the right apples. They weren’t available commercially. We looked at all the info (this was 2014ish) and saw the North American cider market was booming and thought this has got to be a thing – we knew how big cider was in the UK and we missed it so much.
So we decided to plant an orchard. But where? We looked at the US apple growing regions, but Sara was Canadian and wanted to go North to raise the kids. Manitoba (her home province) is not the place to try and grow European cider apples, but BC, ON and NS were possibilities. We saw an article about a new VQA wine region that had just been approved in Ontario & on a trip we decided to visit.
We visited in July 2015, camped at Sandbanks and fell in love with Prince Edward County. We moved in August 2016. It was a whole thing driving up with two vehicles, a rental trailer, 3 kids (ages 6 and under) a dog and a cat, but we made it.
We bought the land in 2016 and started ordering trees right away. Planting started in Spring 2017 to get the initial five acres in the ground. It was a mix of varieties and rootstocks just to see what would work. This would become a theme. Every single one of our orchard trees has been planted by our hands.
Every Spring for the next three years we continued to add to the orchard, getting our trees custom grafted for the varieties and rootstocks we wanted. We’ve now got 10+ acres with 3300 trees across 28 varieties. All of them are cider apples. Most of them are European varieties, with some North American cider apples in the mix too.
Neither of us come from a farming background, we left our corporate jobs to figure out this orchard and start planting trees to make cider. We made a bunch of mistakes. We did some courses and qualifications to get more knowledge (Gary took a cidermaking course offered by CINA at Cornell in 2017. Sara got her Certified Pommelier and BJCP Cider Judge qualifications in 2020).
The cider has won a heap ton of medals, because it tastes amazing. All in pursuit of making the cider we loved in the UK. Only releasing ciders we would be happy to drink.
We hope you enjoy it too.
Our Gnarly Apples
The apples we grow are gnarly. They are often small, knobbly and some even have the texture of sandpaper (aka russeting). We don’t manage our trees for the appearance of the apples (because we don’t need to).
The soil in our orchard is shallow and stony (18-36”) on fragmented limestone bedrock, known as Hillier clay loam. Our trees have to work to get their moisture & our apples tend to have a high sugar content, which concentrates the flavours in the juice.
Cider apples can be classified into a few broad categories related to tannin content, acidity level and other elements, which helps us, as cidermakers, think about how we can blend them. Within each of those categories, there is still a wide range of flavour profiles – we learn more about this every harvest as more of our trees start to come into production.