Cider Winemaking

I learned cider winemaking from my Tufts University colleague Dan Dennett, who embarked on a home cider winemaking operation in the early 1970s, or possibly a few years earlier in the late 1960s. He and two of his friends, Tony Newcomb (a musicologist at the University of California, Berkeley) and Barry Lydgate (a professor of French teaching at Wellesley College) investigated the process, hoping to make cider wine in the Normandy style. In the mid-1970s my family and I joined them in their annual cider picking and pressing, usually held at Dan's summer home in East Penobscot Bay over Columbus Day weekend, and then on "bottling day" in the spring, held at Dan's home in Massachusetts. This kept up for about ten years until I bought an old, two-barrel cider press of my own in the mid-1980s, and started doing a similar picking and pressing with friends here on the island, something that I've kept up now most years since then. I used to invite students from Brown's old-time string band to come and enjoy a weekend in Maine, helping with the picking and pressing, while we played music at night. Nowadays it's local friends and neighbors who help out, and the scale is smaller. Last weekend we pressed a little more than ten gallons, enough to fill two carboys with cider to make wine and then a few gallon jugs for cider drinking immediately.

I'm not knowledgeable about Normandy cider winemaking, but I did watch Dan and the others make their cider wine and learned to do it pretty much as they did, except that I got some 19th century books on the subject of cider winemaking and made some small changes to the procedure. In this blog entry I will summarize the way I've made cider wine for 25+ years now, a wine which others seem to think is very tasty and refreshing. In taste tests it beat a commercial variety made and sold in this area, but my cider wine is not for sale. It's for sharing, first with the friends and neighbors who help with the picking and pressing, and then on social occasions when people visit or when a visit from me would be livened up with some "fotched-on" cider wine. Often I will bring three bottles, each from a different vintage, for like wine from grapes, the wine tastes different from one year to the next.

The first part of the procedure is the apple picking. I like a blend of sweet and juicy apples with tart apples. Over the years I've identified certain trees on this property that produce excellent apples for this blend, and I've also planted some that do. Most of these are grafted trees, which means they are (or once were) known varieties. Among those I do know are Calville Blanc, Kingston Black (an English cider apple), Prima, Liberty, Winesap, Rhode Island Greening and Shiawassee. The first five are trees I planted here; the last two were here when I bought the place in 1979, planted nearly 100 years ago. The Shiawassee is a tentative identification; it may also be a Duchess of Oldenberg. In some years other varieties are added to the mix: Milding is the only known variety, but there are others. Some of the trees may even be "volunteers," non-grafted varieties that grew from seed but produced remarkably good apples. I used to include a crab apple but not for some years. The idea of the blend is to get a good balance of sweet and juicy with tart and acidic. Sweetness will increase the alcoholic content and make for a stronger fermentation; tartness adds flavor, but of course one doesn't want it too tart.

When I started out in the 1980s I tasted each tree's apples and used those that tasted to me like they would make good wine. Some were sweet and some tart but all had plenty of good flavor. That is, they were all full-flavored and none were so tart they puckered my mouth. Those were my criteria then, and so I tried to make a balance, about half sweet and half tart. Today there are books with advice on which apples to grow and in which proportions to blend. But because I was able to produce excellent cider wine by relying on my tastebuds instead of science, I've continued to do so. I should probably add that my father's father was a wine taster by profession, so I come by my tastebuds honestly. Yours may differ and you may want to rely on the suggestions of the books and websites, but I suggest you start off using your tastebuds.

Some of these recent books on cider wine making advise waiting a couple of weeks between picking and pressing. During this period the apples "sweat," become softer and easier to press, and their flavor supposedly concentrates for a better cider. I think this is nonsense. The best cider apple, like the best eating apple or cooking apple, is the freshest apple. Besides, if you have a crew picking apples, why not continue along with the pressing so you have something to show, and drink, for your labor, right then and there?

It's true that in some years I've picked apples and let them wait a couple of weeks before pressing them. When I did so it was because the pressing was going to be later in the season and I needed to pick a particular tree because the apples were ripe before the pressing time, and falling to the ground, or because strong winds were forecast which would blow them down. They sweated away and softened up in their crates waiting for the pressing, and when all was done the cider wine that came of it was do different from years past on that account.   

When it comes time for the apple pressing, I usually alternate a bushel of one sweet variety with a bushel of a tart variety, and then a bushel of a different sweet one, then a different tart one, and so forth. This year the Shiawassee (somewhat tart though juicy, with a slight pear-like aroma) outnumbered the other apples, so the wine will taste more of that than any other. In different years other varieties, particularly Prima and Rhode Island Greening, have been most abundant, and of course the taste of the wine relects those differences.

The apples are not picked by hand, except for the low-hanging ones. Most are shaken down from the trees, either by people climbing them or by the use of a pole pruner hooked over the limbs and moved smartly up and down. As there usually are deer droppings (scat) below the trees, for the deer do like to eat the ones that the wind blows down (windfalls), so we cover the ground with tarpaulins and shake the apples so they fall atop the tarps. Bushel baskets are filled, each with a single variety, and then transported back to the barn where they are washed before the pressing.

The old press--I will try to get a photo or drawing of it in here at some point--is the kind displayed in the old turn-of-the-20th century Sears catalogs, with a grinder mounted above a bushel barrel one one side, and a screw pressing mechanism mounted above a bushel barrel on the other. The barrels have no tops, only sides; and the staves have vertical space between them. There is no bottom to the barrels either; they rest on platforms that move back and forth and in and out of the base of the press. The grinder wheel is turned by hand, with some effort, and after a few minutes a bushel of ground up apples has fallen into the half barrel underneath. This half barrel is tamped down and then pushed on its platform underneath the screw press, the press is screwed down, the cider juice flows out and goes through the slats in the platform to the wooden base of the press, where it slides down and off the press into a plastic or metal container of about a gallon, atop which a nylon mesh strainer rests.

As the cider is being pressed out of the ground apples by the screw mechanism on one side of the press, more apples are being ground into the half barrel on the other side. When the juice has stopped flowing, the screw comes back up, the half barrel now filled with apple "pomace" is taken away and the pomace dumped in the compost pile, while the next half barrel of ground apples is slid under the screw press. And this continues for a few hours, or more, depending on how many apples will be pressed and how much cider made.

The cider itself--it is of course now cider, not wine, because it hasn't fermented--gets poured from the gallon containers, when these are filled, into five-gallon glass "carboys" or jugs, which look very much like the jugs used for office water coolers. These carboys are then covered with simple plastic devices called fermentation locks, which permit the carbon dioxide (a product of the fermentation) to exit from the carboy, without allowing air into the carboy, where it would spoil the cider for wine and turn it to vinegar. Then they are moved into the cellar where they sit for a few days and settle.

Usually, as this year, there is cider left over for drinking. Put into containers such as washed-out plastic jugs that once held fruit juice, these go into the refrigerator and they, too, begin fermenting to "hard cider" which can be tasted after a few days. If too much air gets into the containers the cider will also begin to turn to vinegar.

At this point many cider winemakers add yeast and most add sugar. I do not add yeast, thinking that the natural yeast in the apples is sufficient for the fermentation, and in fact it has never not been. But I do add sugar, which will bring the wine to a sufficient alcoholic content to prevent spoilage once it is bottled. There are books--including the 19th century cider winemaking book that I consult--and online websites that will tell you how much sugar to put in for a certain alcohol content at the finish. Here I do follow science, but someone who doesn't want to consult the books might work with a ballpark figure of one pound of sugar per gallon of cider. The scientific amount depends on the specific gravity of your cider at this point in time, when it just begins to ferment; and to measure the specific gravity one needs a hygrometer, the same instrument that was used to test automobile batteries back in the day, though of course it would not be safe to use an instrument that has been used for batteries; nor is such a hygrometer scaled properly for this purpose. Instead, appropriate hygrometers may be purchased relatively inexpensively on line and in winemaking shops for this purpose. Occasionally one finds old ones in antiques shops, and often the owners do not know what they are. This is really the only scientific measurement that I take and the only time I feel more like a scientist in a laboratory than an artist blending apples for wine.

I put the sugar into the cider this way. I remove and then heat (but not to a boil) about one gallon of cider from each carboy, then add the appropriate amount of sugar for five gallons of cider to that one gallon, and mix so that all dissolves, and pour the mixture back into the carboy. Always there is some left over, so the best way is to remove a half gallon more cider per carboy than is needed, reserve this, and after the mixture of cider and sugar is poured back into the carboy add a bit of the reserve to bring the cider lever back up to the neck of the carboy, but not into the neck, as the mixture expands when fermenting.

And then I just leave the carboys in the cellar to ferment. The best fermenting temperature is slightly above fifty degrees Fahrenheit, I've found, and this is a temperature that the cellar keeps from mid-October when the pressing is completed, until late December when in the coldest weather it goes below fifty and fermentation more or less stops. In the spring when the temperature warms back to fifty the fermentation begins again. At this point some cider winemakers "rack" their wine, siphoning the liquid into other empty carboys, while letting the dregs stay at the bottom of the carboy. I do this in some years; most often I do not. At any rate, when the fermentation ceases while the temperature is above fifty--this is easily told because the cider wine stops making its small bubbles that rise to the top--then it is time either to age the cider in an oak cask, or to bottle it straightaway. I always age it in five gallon oak casks, which means siphoning it into rinsed-out casks, and after a few months in the cask I siphon it into used and cleaned and rinsed wine bottles and cork it.

The oak casks used for aging may be found in antiques shops but they usually are moldy and bad for this process. New ones can be purchased from winemaking supply houses, and good old ones may be found in people's homes, as long as they have kept them clean (sodium bisuplphite works as a wash, and then they must be rinsed and kept filled with water, whenever not filled with wine, so that they don't mold or dry out).

In all it takes about nine months to a year to make a good cider wine from apples. Once mine is siphoned from the casks into bottles and corked, I affix a little label that I made on the computer, printed out and pasted on the outside of the bottle, noting the vintage year. Then the bottles are placed on their sides and left for a few months. In some years they have almost finished fermenting, but not quite; they finish it up in the bottle making some champagne-like fizz in the cider wine as it bubbles when poured into the glass. It's possible to add a tiny bit of sugar to each bottle to make this happen, also. Or some sugar can be added to the mixture in the casks, but this is not as effective. But this procedure risks building up too much pressure inside the bottle, with the result that the cork is blown off after a few days, weeks, or months, and the cider spoils. Wires can be used to hold the corks in, if desired. After a few months the "bottle sickness," as it is called (in reference to a certain closed-in and musty taste of the cider wine) has departed, and the wine is ready to drink. It will keep for several years, sometimes improving in the bottle, sometimes not. The differences in the tastes from one year to the next are larger than in wine made from grapes. Some years the wine is very dry, others not so dry. Some years it is a bit sweeter, like a dessert of sipping wine; in others not so sweet.

That is how I've made cider wine for more than two decades now, and I'm well satisfied with it. It does take a few days of work, but the end is certainly worth the energy expended when one enjoys the wine among friends.

Skunk Cabbages Reborn in October

     Readers of this blog will recall that this year I've been following the growth and decay of the skunk cabbages in the woods behind my house on the island. I've posted photos and updates throughout the growing season, and I've consulted botany books to learn about its lifecycle. My previous entry on the skunk cabbages showed them on Sept. 3 with the leaves in an advanced state of decay or dissolution, and I assumed that the next entry would show a photo of the swampy area without a trace of them. When I went out there a few days ago my first sight was, indeed, of a swampy area with no trace of the skunk cabbage leaves that were decaying and dissolving a month earlier:

      

     But as I got closer in, I saw something that surprised me. Look at the lower part of the photo above, in the center. The plants are sending up spathes as they had in the early springtime. After photographing these (see below), I wondered whether their lifecycle had become confused by the recent rains and warm weather, so I searched the Internet to see if I could learn more about it. Was this an unusual case, an early skunk cabbage resurrection? 

     A scientist named Craig Holdrege has made a study of the skunk cabbage, and written about its lifecyle; but his essay does not mention this phenomenon. Mr. Holdrege is a professor and head of The Nature Institute, in upstate New York, so I emailed him on the chance that he might be willing to take the time to let me know what I was seeing, and what I was not seeing. I sent him this photo of the spathes with the new growth. He kindly replied the next day, and here is part of what he wrote: "Not by any means all, but some skunk cabbage plants let the tips of the buds emerge in late summer and they then stay dormant over the winter. I observe this every year in the area that I often go to.  Many people don't notice this because they don't tend to look for skunk cabbage in the late summer.  You're the second person who has written about this to me in the last couple of days... Why some partially emerge and others don't? I have no idea. In any case I see that the aboveground buds open and develop fine in the following spring." I will watch them over the winter and into the spring.

Heirloom apples and vegetables are in fashion now; should you grow them?

    Heirloom seeds and heirloom apples are in this year. The popular press is full of articles on them. National Public Radio’s Morning Edition did a story on saving seeds and growing heirloom (non-hybrid) vegetables only yesterday. It means something when public culture constructs memory in usable form. But planting heirloom seeds and apples isn’t as easy as planting contemporary varieties, and there’s something naive about the public press making it seem so.

    I should know; I’ve been growing them for thirty years. What I’ve found out about it may be of interest to anyone embarking on such an adventure today. I wouldn’t say don’t do it, but I’d say know what you are doing and be prepared for more failure than success.

    I started growing heirloom seeds and apples, and saving heirloom seeds, three decades ago for the same reasons that are advanced today; one, to help maintain diversity among the available varieties; two, because I read that most contemporary varieties are bred and grown for commercial use, not home use, with the result that they are bred for shipping qualities and appearance—that is, to appeal in the market—rather than primarily for taste. Growing heirloom varieties would not only maintain diversity, a good thing for sustainability in the face of disturbance, but the resulting fruits and vegetables would taste better, I thought. They would have "that old-fashioned [fill in the vegetable or fruit] flavor,” in other words.

    In that period, what have I learned about growing heirloom apples? Aside from the need to find varieties that will do well in one’s own climate, and micro-climate (ask your neighbors), in general the old varieties are not as resistant to pests and disease as the newer ones bred to be disease resistant. With a few notable exceptions such as Baldwin (originally a commercial apple, by the way) and Duchess of Oldenberg, around here most of the heirloom apple varieties require much more care than the newer, disease resistant ones; and they are less vigorous. So if you want to plant that Porter or Newtown Pippin or Jefferson’s favorite, the Esopus Spitzenberg, be prepared to keep them in intensive care, which means spraying several times each growing year, even if you are an organic orchardist (for you will use organic sprays). Check to make sure the varieties you want to plant are hardy and grow well in your area.

     And there is more, much more: deer, apple tree borers, and mice will destroy your young trees, and you will be "some sorry" (as the old timers say around here). Be prepared to keep the critters away; in this area deer love to browse (eat) the buds and branches of apple trees. The only reliable deterrent is a fence eight feet high. There are sprays sold for this purpose but they do not work. The apple tree borer is a beetle that eats its way into the trunk of the young tree a few inches above the ground; they can be deterred with fine wire mesh but the best course of action is to be vigilant and when you see evidence of their damage--the orange sawdust, called frass, at the base of the trunk--take a heavy paper clip, straighten it out, and dig it into the trunk to find and kill the borers. This poking and carving will do less damage to your young tree than the borers. And then in the wintertime, wrap the trunks with a plastic designed for the purpose, to about a foot above the snow line, to keep the mice from eating the bark and girdling and killing the tree. Otherwise they may not do well at all. Some of the old apple varieties I’ve planted do taste very good—Golden Russet is a fine example—but the fact is that after 30 years the newer varieties have done much better and oh, they taste very good also.

     Around here the modern, disease-resistant Prima and Liberty are excellent, and the Anoka (a modern Japanese apple) is exquisite. Now it’s difficult to find these disease resistant apples in the supermarket—they are chiefly for home use, though occasionally one finds them at a food co-op—but those are the ones I would recommend anyone starting a home orchard to consider, along with other disease resistant/immune varieties perhaps better suited to your area, along with the heirloom varieties you hope to taste after some years of intensive care, when your trees begin to bear. After ten years of attention you may find that the heirlooms succeed in all the ways you’d hoped; but if you are successful with those you will find that the disease-resistant ones are succeeding in those same ways, and with less effort in the spraying. I used to spray organically several times per season but after ten years when the trees that were going to grow well were doing so, I stopped spraying altogether. The disease resistant apples are just as well off, it seems, without spray; and that includes the disease resistant heirlooms as well. The others--they are not doing as well but I have enough and am satisfied with those that are.

     The best tasting variety is the one just picked ripe off the tree, heirloom or not. Fresh-picked, sound, ripe apples are delicious. Yes, the different varieties taste different, but they are all good. Well, except for the Ben Davis. As I blogged earlier, about 100 years ago when the Ben Davis was popular as a market apple, someone did a blindfold taste test in which people were asked to taste a Ben Davis and a ball of sawdust. Most people could not tell the difference. Poor Ben. Imagine having your name associated with this apple.

     And if you've never eaten a potato fresh dug (and cooked), you've not tasted how good potatoes can be, either.

    And what have I learned about growing heirloom vegetables from seed? Here the story is different. There are many very good heirloom vegetable seeds available from Seed Savers Exchange as well as in catalogs such as Fedco and Johnny’s Selected Seeds. Their descriptions are, as a rule, accurate. I’ve experimented with these to find the best for my microclimate, and it turned out that many of the best were the older heirlooms. A prime example is the Levi Robinson snap bean. On the other hand, heirloom tomatoes, the most popular kind of heirloom vegetable today, have been variable here, succeeding in some years but not most. Of course, this is scarcely the tomato-growing capital of the North American continent, but one would think that some of the old varieties of tomatoes would do better here than the modern ones simply because there are so many old ones out there. 

     One year I experimented and grew from seed every old variety that I could find information about that had been planted in Maine in the first quarter of the 20th century, about 25 in all. I grew them out in an experimental garden. Most did not grow well; some did. Of those that did grow well, none of them tasted as good as the varieties (from away) that I settled on over the years, for paste and slicing tomatoes. But I don’t regret the experiment. It might have worked for me, and it might work for you. Different varieties do better in different climates and microclimates, and in different years. It was some time before I realized I needed to find varieties resistant to late blight, for example, if I wanted to harvest tomatoes after the end of August. Once realizing this, I looked for this characteristic. Most tomatoes don’t have it. Some of the newer ones, like Defiant, do. Defiant is an interesting case: it’s very tasty, even has that “old tomato flavor”; it’s sufficiently vigorous here, nicely shaped, productive, and of course resistant to late blight. 

     Is Defiant going to be the perfect tomato for me? No, the skin is thick and tough, suggesting it was bred for commercial use, not home use. Thirty or even twenty years ago, on learning that a variety was bred for the supermarket, I’d have stayed away from it, not only on principle but because I believed that heirlooms would always be superior. The Defiant tomato has been the exception and it might even change my mind. Let’s see how it does next year, though.