Why This Bottle, Really? Northern Spy, Eve’s Cidery
Why This Bottle, Really?
Finger Lakes Apples Yield Special Beverage
By Diane Flynt
2020 Northern Spy, Traditional Method Dry Cider, Eve’s Cidery, New York, $19 (available in the cidery’s online store and in select Northeastern markets, also exported to the UK).
A short drive from the prime Riesling vineyards of New York’s Finger Lakes, Autumn Stoscheck grows organic cider apples in three intensively cultivated orchards that she has farmed without chemical interventions for over 15 years. Like the wines made nearby, her ciders reflect fruit variety, site, and soil. She believes that healthy soil creates complex flavor. Her farming practices are labor-intensive, something that’s rare in the apple and cider world. It’s what makes the ciders of Eve’s Cidery so delicious and special.
In the cidery’s Newfield Orchards, on the shores of Cayuga Lake, 40-year-old Northern Spy trees grow on 80 feet of gravel deposited when glaciers receded over 10,000 years ago. American cidermakers have appreciated the acidity and depth of flavor of this variety for centuries. Nine miles away, near the cidery and the town of Van Etten, trees in the Albee Hill Orchard climb the steep sides of the Appalachian escarpment. Here Northern Spys grow on thin soil over shale on a site almost too vertical for farm equipment. The Valley Orchard borders Cayuta Creek where trees grow in the richest soil the region offers. “A defining feature of the Finger Lakes is our diverse sites,” Stoscheck says. “With three orchards, we have the opportunity to produce fruit with dramatically different flavor profiles.”
Her orchard-centric approach to cider began in 2000 when she visited venerable cider orchards in the English West Country, one of the world’s renowned cider regions. At the time, Finger Lakes winemakers were improving vineyard and wine quality, and Stoscheck believed she could do the same for orchards and cider. “I saw a traditional way of making cider using fruit grown to produce characteristic flavors and reflect a site. I saw the potential for cider in the Finger Lakes.” Today Stoscheck turns pruned wood into bio char that she returns to the orchard. She maintains grass cover under the trees.
When she founded Eve’s Cidery in 2001, Stoscheck had to wait several months, until she was 21, to apply for an Alcoholic Beverage Control license. Eve’s Cidery has been certified organic for six years. “I started building soil quality and health 15 years ago and am now seeing the results of our organic program,” she says.
In 2019, she took a sabbatical to work with grapes. She managed a three-acre vineyard and established a biodynamic program for the Finger Lakes’ Forge Cellar, co-owned by the highly respected French winemaker Louis Barroul. She had the opportunity to work harvest with him at Château de Saint Cosme in Gigondas. “The experience in France reinforced for me why winemaking and cidermaking are essential and basic activities. You can farm a site for generations and make a beverage from fruit and soil without a high degree of manipulation and sophisticated equipment.”
With Ezra Sherman, Autumn’s husband of 20 years, Eve’s Cidery produces over a dozen single-variety ciders or blends from its three orchards. Stoscheck grows over 50 cider apple varieties, including English and French bittersweets like Elils Bitter and Fréquin Rouge, bittersharps like Kingston Black, and old American varieties like Hewe’s Crab and Esopus Spitzenberg. The 2020 Northern Spy is a blend of fruit from the Newfield and Albee Hill orchards. It reveals another of the cidery’s commitments to traditional wine practices. Sélection massale is a French viticultural practice, when planting or replanting a vineyard, of using grafts selected from a vineyard’s best older vines. At Albee Hill, Stoscheck created her orchard using grafts from 150-year-old Northern Spy trees she found growing on that site as well as ones from another orchard planted with what was said to be the original strain, all producing apples with superior flavor. Stoscheck says, “The trees at Albee Hill from the older wood are bigger and produce less fruit, but the fruit is intensely flavored with less minerality and more dense fruit flavor.”
To ensure that the wild yeast comes from the orchard, she creates a starter culture by grinding some apples and starting a fermentation before pressing begins. Compared with grape juice, apple juice contains fewer of the nutrients that yeast need. Wild-yeast cider fermentations are not vigorous and often last for weeks or even months. This cider is fermented with wild yeast in a mix of stainless-steel tanks and neutral oak puncheons. Eve’s ciders are naturally sparkling and hand-disgorged. The high-labor fermentation process produces dense texture and concentrated flavors of tart apple, peach, and sweet lemon.
With a hint of fall in the air, I gathered a few wine and cider enthusiasts for a fall meal paired with Eve’s Cidery 2020 Northern Spy. Given this cidermaker’s embrace of French traditions, I chose a French menu: chicken thighs, shallots, and mushrooms sautéed in butter, then braised with cider and finished with a healthy glug of cream. The cider’s silky texture and ripe apple flavors complemented the flavors of the dish, and the cider’s strong acidic backbone provided welcome contrast. We were each happy to have a glass of cider left to enjoy with a rustic apple tart made with Ashmead’s Kernel apples from my own orchard.
Eve’s Cidery’s small production allows it to focus on making the high-labor orchard-centric cider that defines its style. “We are fortunate to have customers who value what we do. I consider it a privilege to be able to make the kind of cider I want to make, and to continue learning,” Autumn says. Learning, experimenting, and reviving centuries-old practices is at the core of Eve’s Cidery. Autumn sums up her philosophy by saying, “Here in the Finger Lakes we’re all babies at this. We don’t have centuries of beverage-making and fruit-growing history to build on. We have so much to learn.” ●
From issue 109The post Why This Bottle, Really? Northern Spy, Eve’s Cidery appeared first on The Art of Eating Magazine.