The juicy business of hard cider
Producers help revive region’s apple-growing legacy
Like many other parts of the country, California is experiencing a hard cider revival, and Sonoma County is at its center.
There are now around 40 commercial cideries in the state, according to the Cyder Market, an online site for makers and drinkers, and a quarter of those are in Sonoma County. It’s a perfect confluence of the region’s wine industry and its apple-growing history — after all, it’s home to the beloved, flavor-packed Gravenstein heirloom apple, which many cider makers take advantage of during its short season.
Mostly family-run operations, a few local cider produc- ers have planted their own bittersweet and bittersharp apples, varieties that add structure, tannins and overall complexity to hard cider. Plus, thanks to consistently dry summers compared with applegrowing regions in other parts of the country — and perhaps an unexpected side effect of the drought — California fruit is especially concentrated in flavor.
“We’re finding that our ciders have a meatiness to them. Some have austerity and delicate notes. They have character,” says Ellen Cavalli of Tilted Shed Ciderworks in Windsor. “It’s setting our ciders apart.”
You won’t find New Englandstyle historic apple orchards here. Around the time John Adams was famously drinking a mug of hard cider every day at breakfast, Spanish missionaries were planting wine grapes here. Still, Sonoma County has its own apple legacy with the Gravenstein, which many worry is being supplanted by wine grapes. There’s hope that the nascent cider industry could reverse that trend.
“In California, we’re just catching up,” says Nils Reid of Golden State Cider, a new brand from Devoto Orchards Cider in Sonoma County. “The key areas — the Northeast, the Midwest and the Northwest — have a deeper heritage of apples.”
Northern California has a
deep heritage as well, asserts Jolie Devoto of Devoto Orchards Cider. “A lot of Californians don’t know what great apples we have.”
That’s exactly what Jeffrey House thought when he first visited Sebastopol, the apple capitol of Sonoma, in the early 1990s. The English transplant had been working as an importer for British cider company Blackthorn. Worried that he would lose the account to a bigger player, he was interested in starting his own cidery.
“As I came up on a sunny March day, the green hills were covered with happy cows. I thought, ‘I’ve been to this place before — it’s like England with sunshine,’ ” House says (it’s a story he tells often and with relish).
He walked into a few big apple-processing plants and asked if they made cider, and everyone said no. There were apples everywhere, but not a spot of cider to drink.
So he started Ace Cider in 1993, buying local juice and selling his product by the keg and bottle, becoming California cider’s modern-day Johnny Appleseed. He gets credit for running the first cider pub in the country, at least in the modern era. It’s since closed, but he now runs a smaller pub open on Friday afternoons.
Though it’s made more like wine, hard cider tends to have alcohol content similar to beer or lower, typically 5 to 7 percent (though it can be higher). In traditional cider making, the apples are shredded and then pressed. Cider makers ferment the juice, either with commercial yeasts or wild yeasts found naturally on the apple skins, from several weeks to several months, depending on the style and quality of the cider.
Because Ace now produces more than 500,000 cases a year in seven flavors, the company mostly sources juice and concentrate from growers in Washington and as far away as Michigan, along with some from local orchards.
“Our juice demands get bigger and bigger,” says House, who says that the company has seen growth at 30 percent annually and that he turned down an offer to sell it for $55 million because he wants to keep the business for his sons.
David Cordtz, one of the company’s early cider makers, is now owner of Sonoma Cider in Healdsburg. He came to Ace with experience in the wine industry and, after Ace, launched the organic juice company Sonoma Sparklers. He made hard cider there for a couple years too, but organic juice was a bigger seller at the time, so he focused on the nonalcoholic product until hard cider’s time was ripe.
“Not quite halfway through 2012, I saw the numbers start to spike for the hard cider category,” says Cordtz, who founded Sonoma Cider with his son, Robert, in late 2013. Robert just debuted a limited-run series of a sarsaparilla vanilla flavor of cider called Washboard.
Sonoma Cider has distribution across the country and produced around 60,000 to 70,000 cases in 2014; Cordtz projects at least doubling that this year. With three flavors, including pear and bourbon, the brand’s main edge is that it only uses certified organic apple juice from Washington,
Oregon and Sonoma.
Another brand exclusively using West Coast fruit is Golden State Cider in Sebastopol. Devoto and her husband, Hunter Wade, along with partner Reid, created the brand in 2014 as a way to expand beyond their limited and higher-end Devoto Orchards Cider, which had launched two years earlier.
“For us, it really comes down to the apples,” says Jolie Devoto. “That’s a large part of why we chose the two different brands.”
Devoto Orchards Cider is made with the juice of dry-farmed cider and heirloom varieties grown by Devoto’s parents, who first planted their orchard in 1976, and other local growers. Aged up to six months, it’s sold in wine bottles, whereas the unaged Golden State Cider comes in cans.
While Sonoma County fruit is only available from August to October, they can get fresh-pressed juice from Washington year round for Golden State Cider, thanks to its longer growing season and high-tech storage facilities.
They don’t use concentrate in either brand, Devoto says, because they want to focus on a freshpressed product. She doesn’t like how pectins and delicate esters are removed during the concentration process.
Using all juice means Devoto Orchards Cider is a small producer — 4,000 cases a year — and Devoto plans to keep it that way. Meanwhile, Golden State Cider is already produc- ing 5,000 cases a year and hopes to reach 20,000 soon.
Not far away, the wife-and-husband team of Cavalli and Scott Heath make Tilted Shed cider with only local, dryfarmed, organic fruit, including from their own young cider orchard in Sebastopol. They’ve expanded beyond their initial 300 gallons in 2011 to 5,000 gallons in 2014 and recently opened a tasting room where Cavalli holds cider appreciation classes.
“People are so used to the Wine Country experience, and trying to get them into the cider repertoire is what I’m all about,” she says.
They ferment their ciders so slowly that they often don’t finish releasing ciders for a year or two
after bottling.
“For us, time adds a lot of complexity to it. We hold it back until we’re ready,” says Cavalli.
Their Lost Orchard Dry Cider is made with fruit from an abandoned cider orchard overgrown with wild fennel and blackberry brambles, planted several decades ago by farmers who were ahead of their time. They spend a lot of time trying to figure out how the apple varieties vary by growing site, and will press juice from two separate sites to see how it comes out differently.
“We’re really trying to figure out how do growing conditions affect the levels of tannins, phenolic compounds, sugars and acidity in our apples,” she says, the way it’s commonly done with wine grapes.
“How is the climate, how is the drought, how are the growing soils expressing themselves in the apples and in the cider?” she adds. “It’s something that’s very exciting for us as we taste cider from year to year.”