Ciderfest at Copia
Copia’s Ciderfest this past Sunday was a glorious anticipation of autumn, where 16 cider producers set up tables at which attendees sampled a fermented product of a different fruit than what you normally find in the Napa Valley: apples.
The line to get in filled the entry way nearly to the door. It was a great turnout.
I first spoke with Will Drayton, the proprietor of Sawhorse Cider. He’s a winemaker full time, but has been making cider on his own since he moved to California from London 16 years ago.
He is based in Sebastopol but picks his apples from all over Napa and Sonoma counties - from Howell Mountain to Spring Mountain. He tries to find as many interesting varieties of apples as he can which he finds gives his cider its unique characteristics. He ferments each variety separately and tastes each lot to see how he wants to blend them. “We’re making it just like wine,” he said. “We’re trying to, as much as possible, learn about the different varieties, what each apple or pear variety brings to the blend. We try to be as close to a direct transport of the tree flavor as possible.”
The different varieties of apples he uses is something he likes to feature. On his table, next to a jar of wild carrots he picked in an orchard that morning, was a sign that listed some of the varieties he uses: Gravensteins, Rhode Island Greenings, Newtown Pippins, Jonathans, Granny Smith, Crab Apple - and then a Bartlett Pear.
Next to Drayton’s table was Napa Cider Company’s President Keith Allan, a burly retired pharmaceutical executive who worked for Dey Labs in South Napa until they shut down their operation.
He features two ciders: a rosé, blended with pinot noir to give it a nice pink color, then a hard cider that is blended with muscat for body. He sources his apples fresh from Washington State and the wine comes from Napa and Sonoma.
Blending cider with other flavors is not unusual, but he was the only person there that was doing it with wine grapes. He said, “I was tasting various pear, pineapple, ginger and hibiscus ciders, and I enjoy all of them actually, even the guava, but living here and wanting to have something that mirrors Napa and Napa winemaking - why don’t I experiment with different wines and see what would pair well with apples?”
Allan is the man with the vision for the company, and he has a team of cider makers that oversee production. You can find his ciders in the Grill at Silverado Country Club, at the Ranch Markets in Napa and Yountville, Billco’s on tap, Calmart in Calistoga and there are a couple hotels in Napa that are interested in them as well.
He was just picked up by a distributor, but still recognizes the importance of salesmanship. He gets his placements by actually going in person to prospective markets or restaurants and presenting his cider. He said, “the name is very intriguing, they want something that is from Napa, so a lot of the time the response is, ‘I’ll take it!’”
His team at the table all had shirts with a very direct marketing message. They say, “Hard Cider for the Wine Enthusiast.” He could not be more clear to whom he is marketing.
At this point it was 1:00PM and I decided to avail myself to the food that Copia had prepared for the event. Everything on the menu was inspired by, or included, apples. Bratwurst was served with cider mustard, apple kraut, cider pickled onions and apple cider ketchup. A chicken wrap was made with cider poached chicken and Fuji apples. The vegetable wrap included cider braised sweet potato.
I had an Apple Ricotta Tartine which was toasted pain levain, smeared with a rich, creamy ricotta and candied pecans. Then that was topped by a very mild arugula and apples that had been glazed with an apple cider gastrique.
A gastrique, by the way, is made by taking caramelized sugar and deglazing it with vinegar and then adding a flavor - in this case the apple cider. Gastriques are a rich, potent addition to intensify the flavor of a sauce, or can be used on their own, as it was with this tartine.
Due to the way the event was organized, I wasn’t able to taste any of the ciders presented with my snack. But they did have a bottle of Martinelli’s Gold Medal Sparkling Cider and they poured me a generous glass.
It was somehow fitting that among 16 small batch, artisan cider producers, I would be drinking one of the oldest, and largest cider producers in California, and maybe the United States. The difference in flavor was striking. The Martinelli’s has a fair amount of residual sugar, and no alcohol, which, quite frankly, made it easy to drink. Whereas, all of the cider producers filling Copia’s hall that day, seemed intent on, like they do with wine, fermenting their apples until the juice was bone dry.
And like with wine, to some, bone dry ciders may be an acquired taste.
As I ate my tartine, I enjoyed the sounds of the Max Bonick Brown Barn Band. It was four guys - Louis Salcedo on guitar, Tyler Harlow on double bass, Colin Gordon on drums and the eponymous Max Bonick on mandolin. I couldn’t quite place their genre of music, and asked Bonick how he would describe what he played. He said, “jazz-grass” and I looked puzzled, and then he clarified: “jazzy blue grass.” That made perfect sense to me. It's the kind of music you would hear at a county fair in Kentucky in the 1920’s - a jaunty, slightly twangy confluence of strings.
I finished my tartine, and then headed over to meet Sarah Hemly, President of Hemly Cider.
She is married to Matt Hemly, a sixth generation apple and pear farmer in the Sacramento River Delta. After having children, she decided she wanted to make her own cider, and traveled to France, England and Tasmania to explore different cider producers.
What she found was that “in California we have access to amazing fruit, but it’s dessert fruit, so like in wine terms, it would be taking concord grapes and making them into a complex wine” which isn’t really done.
She continued, “there is specific fruit that’s grown for cider. If you take an English style cider where they are using cider apples and perry pears back to the US and use bartlett pears, it falls flat on your palate. So the Australians have found a way of taking dessert fruit and making that into a balanced cider. So I flew down to Tasmania and talked to whiskey and cider makers down there and came back here and developed this recipe for using pears.”
Dessert fruit, as its distinguished from cider fruit, are the sweet apples we get in modern American grocery stores: Fujis, Honeycrisps, Galas, Red Delicious and the like. Cider apples, according to her, are crab apples. And the notion of “Pear Cider” doesn’t actually exist in England. There, what we call Pear Cider, they simply call “Perry.” Cider only refers to apples.
In the US, Hemly doesn’t have access to the cider apples like they do in England, so she has to use dessert fruit. She would plant her own, but it takes about four years to get an apple crop, and eight years to get a pear crop. In England they say, you plant pears for your “heirs,” because it takes so long for them to produce. The pear orchards in the Delta where she gets her pears were planted in the 1860’s and her apple trees were planted in the 1980’s.
Hemly told me “pears are a lot harder than apples. When you press them they just fly out the side. There is something about the cell structure that doesn’t give up the juice. Growing them is harder, picking them is harder, when the pH comes in at 4.2, and alcohol is 7% maximum, you’re basically at varsity level winemaking and you haven’t even gotten started.”
The key to pear cider is pressing it at the right time. It then goes through primary fermentation and malolactic fermentation. She ages everything in oak to add tannen, then back sweetens the cider with fresh pressed juice.
Sound familiar? Once again, a cider maker is using the same techniques that winemakers use to produce fine wine.
Hemly gave me a taste of her jalapeno pear cider. She said that when she decided to mix a mexican hot pepper in with her cider, the Tasmanians got really angry with her. And then, when they tried it they got even more angry, because they liked it.
Cider was huge in the US leading up to prohibition, but, like wine, most of the cider apple trees were pulled out. Hemly told me that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had their own cider orchards. Johnny Appleseed, that mythical American vagabond, was planting seeds for cider apples, not apple pie.
In our discussion, we spoke extensively about the similarities between cider and wine, but there is a huge difference between them when it comes to the perception by the public: in the US, cider is consumed like beer. “The tricky part is, that we are made like wine, but marketed like beer. Everybody sees our ABVs (alcohol by volume) in line, and our packaging is in line and the price point is in line, but then it comes from fruit? It’s harvest based? It’s not just a bunch of ingredients that are thrown together?” We both concluded that this is why it is so important for cider producers to have events like Ciderfest at Copia, where the public can get educated about what cider is, and is not.
I thanked Hemly for her time, and stepped over to a table to take some notes. There I met Sandy Sauter, a chef in charge of Public Programs with the CIA at Copia. She had just finished a “Family Funday” class on donuts and fritters. Family Funday is their weekly Sunday class where kids can come with their parents to learn about cooking. “It’s a great thing that parents can do with their kids, when you can’t take your kids to a winery,” she said. “We don’t teach down to the kids,” she said, meaning that they want the kids to learn as much as they can about cooking as well as keep the class interesting for the parents, too.
Today’s class showed kids what they can do with apples, in keeping with the ciderfest theme. She pushed toward me a bamboo plate filled with donut holes that had an apple cider glaze and I took one and popped it into my mouth.
I then milled about looking at the other ciders. There was Eve’s Cidery, from the Finger Lakes AVA in upstate New York, whose packaging and flavor profile may be the most wine-like. The cider comes in beautiful 750ml chardonnay and hock bottles, corked with real cork or a champagne cage. They also presented an ice cider, made just like ice wine.
I tasted Eve’s Cidery’s Darling Creek Cider and it was so dry it bordered on astringent. I felt like someone who grew up drinking Coca-Cola, tasting a tannic, astringent young Bordeaux for the first time. But it’s important not to judge something like that in such a casual, crowded environment. A stand up tasting is the worst way to really appreciate the subtleties of a fine wine and I would never want to pass judgement a wine, or cider, or any fine beverage in a place where I couldn’t really focus on what I was tasting. The finest wines in the world, heavily curate where how their wines are presented.
I googled Eve’s Cidery and found an extensive discussion of the varieties of apples they use, the composition of their orchard soils and how their ciders are the purest expression of the soils and apples they could possibly produce. The website says everything except the word “terroir.”
Further, there is the cider dinner where a chef will prepare a tasting menu specifically meant to be paired with their ciders, or you can schedule your own private cider tasting.
It seems that while Sawhorse, Napa Cider Company and Hemly’s talk about the similarities extant between wine and cider, Eve’s Cidery is actually taking that similarity to its logical conclusion and treating the production - and marketing - of their cider like fine wine.
By now it was 2:30, the event was supposed to end at 3:00 and there was still a line out the door to get in. I began to think: that apple tartine wasn’t very filling. How about a bratwurst, some apple kraut and cider mustard and a big glass of Martinelli’s?
And that’s what I did.
