Farm and Fruit
The art of winemaking starts on the farm and in the soil. Managing the health and fertility of the soil in which our trees and plants grow, maintaining an ecological diversity of life on our farm, and growing specific varieties that are appropriate to our climate, are examples of how farming practices can affect our winemaking practices. Like any truly local agricultural product, you can speak of cider as having a “terroir,” which essentially implies that it is affected by place-specific factors. We’re blessed here in the foothills of Central, VT to have an incredible diversity of cider apple trees growing wild and within abandoned orchards, rooted as legacies of an historic cider culture. This has allowed us to jump right into the art of making Cider as Wine, without having to wait 10-15 years for our nursery trees to begin bearing fruit. As we continue to graft and sow new trees for the future, we are also re-discovering and pruning-back a great number of elder apple trees that dot our local landscape. To borrow a term from the Ragione’s of Italy, we’re deep in a process of an arboreal archeology. These elder trees bear true cider apples, and date back to an age when cider was the common folks’ drink; a time when apples were grown to make a wine as profusely as grapes are grown today.
One apple is not like another. Indeed, there are several thousand known varieties of apples on the Earth, and ultimately unlimited potential for diversity. In making Cider as Wine, we draw from a blend of different types of cider apples. These are apples that display varying levels of bitter tannins and acidity. As a painter blends different hues to get the perfect color, we blend cider apples to make a well balanced apple wine. We glean our apples from August through November from local fields, forests, backyards, and orchards. As different varieties of apples ripen at different times, we end up with micro-seasonal blends of juice pertaining to the ripening times of the apples. Traditionally, Cider apples have been classified into 4 categories, from which we as cider makers blend: sharp (high acidity) bittersharp (higher tannins and acidity) sweet (low acidity) and bittersweet (high tannins, low acidity).
After harvesting, we allow our apples to cure in the barn for a period of time before milling and pressing.We use an Italian made water-pressure press to extract the juice from the pomace. Often times, we allow our must – raw juice – to have extended contact with the pomace – pulpy apple residue. We’ll do this before pressing, or we’ll allow pomace to enter our fermentation vessels. This process contributes to the inoculation of our musts with native cultures which carry out fermentation, while also imparting more interesting flavor profiles from the phytonutrients found in apple pomace.
When Wine is Born
The apple juice that flows out of our press is fresh, sweet- tart and delicious. And although we regularly enjoy the apple in its juice state, we’re most partial to Cider as Wine. To date we’ve fermented our wines principally in oak barrels, glass, and stainless steel, and we hope to begin fermenting in egg-shaped clay vessels within the next 5 years. After filling our fermentation vessels with fresh juice, there is a certain period of gestation, which lasts in proportion to ambient temperatures, until fermentation begins to rise-up. In ancient cultures around the world, this period was often referred to as a boiling, a fire being rekindled, or a process of spiritual birthing. We choose to ferment our ciders as cool as we possibly can, under the principle that a slow and steady fermentation aids in the longevity of our ciders and preserves essential volatile compounds that contribute to the finished flavor profile.
Whenever possible we use gravity to move our ciders along their course from vessel to bottle throughout fermentation and maturation. After fermentation has slowed way down, we assess each vessel full of cider and decide whether to leave the wine on its lees, or rack it into a new vessel. At this point, we may blend one vessel with another depending on its taste profile, with an ultimate goal of balanced complexity, smoothness, and liveliness. We allow our ciders to ferment out to dryness, while practicing patience as they undergo the process of maturation.
To make a wine most expressive of the place from which it rose, we believe that the continuum from farm-to-barn-to-cellar should flow like water to the sea; where the cellar is merely an extension of the farm; settled beneath the roots of plants, serving as a micro-climatic haven for fruit to further mature along its continuum from bud to glass.
Cellar
The cellar is a place of alchemy and repose. Below the roots of our farm, away from the light of the sun, the cellar is calm, cool and composed. It is a place of Yin, where Earth energies infuse into our wines. It is here wherein our wine is allowed to age and transform by a succession of yeasts and bacteria. Aging wine in a cellar is a process of healing, where chemistry, ecology and subtle energy converge. The cellar at Fable Farm Fermentory has evolved over the years. We embarked upon our journey making wine in the cellar of a village farmhouse from the 1800’s. We then expanded into commercial production of cider in the barn connected to this farmhouse where seasonal temperature fluctuations brought too much heat and humidity in the summer and at times would freeze our barrels of wine in Winter. 2016 has brought many blessings our way, one of which is an underground cave, dugout against a bedrock shelf and situated down slope from a centuries-old apple orchard. This concrete fortress is a cloak of consistency, protecting our ciders from the ups and downs of the outside world. It is here where we both barrel-age and bottle-age most of our ciders before sending them to market.
Although many people claim that cider does not age well, this has not been our experience. Even without using sulfites at bottling, we have noticed that many of our ciders get better with time, albeit our oldest ciders are only 5 years old (2011). This may be attributed to the diverse yeast-bacterial ecology present in our cider, and the slow-and-steady nature of our fermentations. In addition, higher quantities of tannic acids and acidity are generally present in our ciders due to the fact that we use a lot of bitter and sharp cider apples, age in oak barrels, and often practice extended contact of the cider on its pomace.
Bottle
A bottle is a bridge for wine out of the cellar and to the People; it serves as a vessel of transport (the amphora of our times). The Body and Spirit of wine are contained within a bottle; it is full of potential energy as it travels across the landscape to bring vigor and merriment to those who please.
After our cider has undergone its alchemical transformation of coherence in our storage vessels, it is time for it to flow by gravity into bottle to be hermetically sealed and allowed to cure within the amorphous curves of glass. At this stage the cider is fit to drink, but may only improve with time in-bottle. Within a given window of time, detrimental or troublesome aspects begin to fade as wine matures in-bottle.
A Time and a Place for Still and Sparkle
We choose to bottle our ciders both still (non-carbonated) and sparkling. Our still ciders mature smoothly and begin to drink like a dry and tart white wine after about a year of aging. We strongly believe that there is a place at the table for non-carbonated ciders. Early settlers often enjoyed cider in its still state, as an easy-to-drink accompaniment with food. We bottle our sparkling ciders with the Ancestral Method, otherwise known as Petillant Naturel, wherein wines are bottled before the completion of primary fermentation and without additions of sugars or yeasts. By bottling before all of the natural sugars from the fruit are fermented out by native yeasts, we capture the CO2 to produce a sparkling wine. We also will bottle using the Traditional Method, otherwise known as Methode Champenoise, wherein an additional source of sugar is added to initiate a secondary fermentation in bottle, producing a sparkling wine. Our sparkling ciders can range from slight – with but a tickle of carbonation felt in the mouth – to heavy, with a champagne-like carbonation.
Botanical Infusions
We truly value the art of cider making as a way to profile the diversity of apples and their yeast-bacteria culture in finished ciders. But we are also keen on using wines as a preservation medium for plant medicines gleaned from our local fields and forests. As we continue to increase production of other fruits, herbs and plants on our farm, we will begin to offer a diversity of botanical ciders and wines. We’re excited to work alongside an increasing number of farm wineries in expanding upon the notion of “terroir” to include: an integrated agricultural, environmental and cultural paradigm. We’ve experimented thus far with infusing the following herbs and fruits into our ciders, all of which were harvested from our farm: elderberry, elderflower, black and red currant, wild grape, lilac, dandelion, basil, sage, and hops.