Make room, wineries and brew pubs: Virginia awash in cider
Retail sales of hard cider (at stores, not restaurants) grew by about 11 per cent in 2015, a fraction of the 71 per cent growth the year before, according to Nielsen.
MINERAL, Virginia: In the scruffy pine woods near Lake Anna, workers are spraying insulation into the walls of Chris Denkers’ big gamble.
Denkers, 33, prowls the construction site in jeans, Marmot fleece and ball cap. He built most of this himself, a barnlike structure with red siding and stone- clad foundation. In April, he plans to open it up as the Coyote Hole Ciderworks – a huge investment for his family and friends in an industry that’s suddenly on the rise in Virginia.
Ten years ago, there was only a single cidery in the state, and it had just opened. Denkers’ will be the 19th.
Or 18th - state officials disagree about the exact number. The industry is just now getting big enough to track. The state department of alcoholic beverage control didn’t collect production and tax data on cider makers until July.
“It’s a baby industry,” said Denkers, who moved here seven years ago from upstate New York. “A lot of wineries are now starting to do cider.”
The rise was predictable. There seems to be a winery at every highway exit, and craft beer breweries are popping up like coffee shops. Cider was ripe for a resurgence. But Virginia is catching up to a national ciderdrinking trend that may have eased in the past year or two.
Retail sales of hard cider (at stores, not restaurants) grew by about 11 per cent in 2015, a fraction of the 71 per cent growth the year before, according to Nielsen. Draft magazine, which covers the beer and cider industry, reported over the summer that cider sales slowed toward the end of last year.
Washington state and New York have far more mature cider markets than Virginia. But Virginia has apples, and picturesque countryside, and the new businesses feed other industries important to the state.
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe is a big booster of cider, as well as craft beer and wine. His office regularly cranks out press releases announcing jobs that involve fermentation. Brewpubs and wineries are among his favorite spots to hang out.
“Sometimes I get some grief from people” for the announcements, McAuliffe said. “But this whole space drives our agriculture business and at the same time helps boom our tourism.” He can spout the precise numbers off the top of his head: “Last year we sold 416,750 cases of cider, and that was up 52 per cent from the year before.”
And to be clear, the governor’s talking about hard cider. Technically, it’s a wine, fermented from the juice of a fruit. Most hard ciders have a little more alcohol than the typical beer, and maybe a little less than the average grape wine. The same is roughly true for its sweetness.
Cider is another of those forsaken products that was huge in colonial times - like hemp or leeches. Thomas Jefferson cultivated cider apples at Monticello, and John Adams drank it every day. After all, water was often unsafe back then, so cider was a healthier option. ( A reporter at Vice recently spent a week living in Colonial mode and found himself constantly drunk from all the cider).
Cider apples are different varietals from the ones people eat - gnarlier to look at and less tasty. Many of the old trees were ripped up in Virginia during Prohibition, so growers have had to re- establish them. They come with poetic old lip- smacking names such as Albemarle Pippin, Roxbury Russet, Burford’s Redflesh and Winesap.
Jefferson’s favourite cider apple was the Taliaferro, “nearer to the silky Champagne than any other,” he wrote, according to the Monticello web site. But that variety has disappeared.
Virginia still has a sizeable apple industry, ranked sixth in the US, producing nearly 200 million pounds worth roughly US$ 35 million per year. Cider orchards are a miniscule portion of that, but increasing. Denkers, for instance, committed to buying more than a million pounds of Virginia-grown apples and other fruits during the next three years.
Cider makers tend to fall into three categories: The mass market (Angry Orchard, owned by the maker of Samuel Adams beer), the mid-range (often made from dessert apples and served in kegs or beer-type bottles) and the fussy artisanal (wine bottles all the way).
“This particular business is based on the farm winery model,” said Geoff Robinson, director of sales and marketing at Castle Hill Cider outside Charlottesville. By that he means that Castle Hill, set in the patrician foothills of the Keswick hunt country, is very much a small-batch operation with a cosy tasting room and facilities for private events such as weddings.
Castle Hill was the state’s third cidery when it opened in 2010, Robinson said. He’s not worried about the recent flurry of competitors.
“It’s still a rising-tide-liftsallships kind of thing,” he said. The big national brands may have saturated the market, but he believes the local- source movement leaves lots of room for craft ciders to grow.
And really, cider is only part of the equation for a place like Castle Hill, with its temple-like white barn and painterly vistas. Wedding photo books are more prominent than menus around the tasting room. “We’ve seen this wedding industry boom and blow up in the last few years,” Robinson said.
Denkers scouted Castle Hill, among other places, when gathering ideas for Coyote Hole. But he’s aiming at a slightly different crowd - fewer cheese plates and millennials, more BBQ and families with kids.
He and his wife, Laura,moved from New York to his sister-inlaw’s basement in Ashburn seven years ago when he got hired to do Web design for a government contractor. After his boss told him he could work from home, Denkers moved to Lake Anna, a rambling, unpretentious getaway spot between Fredericksburg and Richmond.
There, he and his wife are raising twin seven-year- old boys. It’s a relaxed lifestyle of panning for gold in local creeks and watching for coyotes on trailcams stationed around their property.
Denkers is a guy who likes to build stuff. He built a house for his in-laws, and with another friend started a non-profit that hosts party events to raise money to fight cystic fibrosis, which both of his sons have. He has home-brewed beer and cider for years.
The cidery grew out of all those interests. Armed with a 60-page business plan and about US$ 750,000 ( RM3.4 million) in investment from his family and several friends, Denkers has spent the past year methodically lining up permits, ordering equipment and designing everything from logos to the main building.