So much has been happening in the past month, I'm so happy... but broke as always.
First off, Jason and I hit up the amish country wineries. We started out at Breitenbach, which if you see it from the highway, it's this giant gorgeous purple castle thing that just begs for you to stop. We ordered an oven fired pizza and wandered around their massive gift shop. I snuck out back and pointed out every piece of machinery and rapid fire explained what each does and what I did in North Carolina and everything I learned. Their tours of the production room were $3 and we were waiting for our pizza so I didn't mind not seeing the inside. Their giant stainless steel tanks were outside, which is odd to me because it's so cold, but I think their production is higher than their space.
We taste tested their wines, a lot of whites and sweets and every fruit wine you can think of, including cranberry. Their merlot was good, their cabernet sauvingnon was accurate, but I liked the festival blend the best. They had a tiny new vineyard probably in its second year off to one side, with rolling hills and pastures out front. It was ok, if not completely geared towards traveling tourists. The pizza was a bit disappointing and we had order envy from the fresh, hot paninis and big salads coming out all around us. $5 a glass got us small, not engraved glasses filled with wine which we sipped while in a rather full small indoor dining area with huge windows.
We left pretty happy and pleased with our Sunday afternoon, but walking around we saw a little cheese house up the street which we decided to check out.
It was Swiss Heritage Winery and Broad Run Cheese House, a quaint little building packed full of lace, old hollywood memorobilia, and cheese serving ladies wearing traditional dresses.
Their cheese was divine, with samples all over of their different chutneys and sauces and I loved that you could look behind the counter through a windowed door and see their production room with giant stainless steel vats with big stirring spoons on conveyor belts.
Oh, and their wine was amazing! All sourced from the Ohio grapes and fruits, they all had amazing character and flavors that were rich and complex. I couldn't tell if the guy pouring was also the winemaker, but he seemed to really like what he was doing.
We came home with a blend called Back to the 40s and many promises to go back when time and money allow.
Anyway, I am still processing what I learned from racking and bottling the last time I was in North Carolina and I'm really excited to start making wine. Maybe it's just the dormancy of everything that makes me think -what's the next step- but I am worried that my little 13 acres of soon to be highly productive vines will have no where to go to mature into beautiful wines. I am not very excited to go out into the fields and spend a ton of time and energy if I don't know where the grapes will be pressed. I think I have been staring too much at the facebook of Gervasi Vineyards opening just up the street, where some rich dude wanted to make a winery and hell, he's doing it! His building jumped up with contractors and decorators and helpers all at his bidding. He has a wine logo and bottle designs and a beautiful crush pad and production house. And I am envious. I wish we had plans or a foundation or something I could put my hand on and say, yes this is happening. It just seems so far off right now.
Anyway, my cider is ready to be bottled now, which should be what we are doing tonight. I'm not going to clarify it. I am pretty behind with my holiday brew, but I should start tonight and maybe it will be ready in time for Christmas. It's terribly cold here and getting colder. I smell of roadkill from petting a dog before my nose caught up with the aweful scent. Guess it's time for a shower.
So I'm back down south and this morning the sunlight is pouring straight through the windows brilliantly. It's on the brink of tshirt weather and I have bruises appearing all over again from moving around big heavy things and being awkwardly coordinated. I really wish I could pick this place up and move it to Ohio, or pick up my little 14 acres and plop it down here. Books on tape get me through the car ride and I'm halfway through Plague of the Doves, which has me eagerly awaiting the ride home just to see what happens next. If I had the paper copy, I'd surely have torn through it already.
Anyway, I came down to help with racking, mixing and bottling. The first few days, I just danced around on top of hundreds of cases of wine, reorganizing and bungeeing them together. I have long lists of things to do so I made a pandora station all around Gil Mantera's Party Dream, which works as long as no one is around for the most part and I can dance and sing along. They keep throwing this sweet Swedish dance pop band that's my new fav, if I could only remember their name. We started racking yesterday. Pretty much, I pump out the wine that's in the barrel, clean out the barrel, put the wine back in the barrel, and taste test the wine. There are hundreds of barrels. I keep thinking that my pallet is getting better but I'm still not sure about a lot of it, and there is no way that I could draw the wine from a barrel and tell you what type and year like Robert can. Oh, and so far, there is one barrel of a reserve merlot that is to die for. And I think I like Sangiovese. Oh... and the Frontenac...... um, still has some work to be done yet to make it tone down a bit. It's a wine that you put in your mouth and it seems like it's screaming at you. The F. Gris is the same way. The Marquette is mellowing in oak and it should be pretty good. But all of them still have a long way to go.
Hmm, so today is more racking, more catered food, and more wine tastings. Life is good.
Oh my gosh. I'm back in Ohio. My goats and sheep were happy to see me. My little heeler pup is pretty mad and not talking to me right now.
I kinda feel like a freight train that just hit a brick wall. It was so much of a flurry of work and stress that was just building and building up to a 7 ton harvest and then crushing, crushing, crushing, and driving and learning and then BAM! Nothing.
Nothing is a weird feeling. I drove by my vines, dormant and ready for their winter sleep. I came home to black leaves of peppers in the gardens and the stupid turkeys ate my kale patch. My head is still spinning from all the stuff that I learned and I feel like I wrote down a lot but there's still so many more questions that are still rolling around in my brain but now there's no expert in front of me to make me laugh and tell me interesting facts about fermentation.
I can't help but think that I want to do it all over again. The learning curve just started and I was getting it down towards the end and then ... nothing.
My feet are cold here in Ohio and I'm listening to my new Pandora radio station and pacing around my house. I'm filling out paperwork to be a substitute teacher, but that's taking forever and the temp winter job market is pretty slim.
To add insult to the nothingness, I found a page for this budding vineyard just down the road with money to spare that is building a huge, amazing building with all their ducks in a row and everything in motion for a quick opening next year. Check out Gervasi Vineyards. Amazing. Wood fired pizzas and a bistro and winding stair cases, a nice big crush pad with all new equipment. So amazing.
Anyway, I'm adjusting priorities in my time off and trying to figure out what next year will bring. In the meantime, I'm fermenting hard cider, brewing my holiday beer, making as much music as I can, filling my freezer with veggies and meats from this year, picking up a brush again to paint crazy chicken paintings for Christmas presents, and finally sitting down and submitting some writing works to farm-type magazines about my crazy adventures in what I did, failed at, and did well this year.
This time of year is always hard, but I plan to keep my chin up and look forward to what is new and growing again in the spring.
I’m all showered up and ready to go out to dinner with the family for Robert and Anna’s birthday. This week flew by in a flurry of work and wine and I was so glad when we were about halfway through crushing the last of the grapes but had to stop for dinner out. And I was so glad that I got invited to dinner too.
I still don’t think my sense of smell is fine tuned enough. I like when Robert tells me that something smells or when he says what he thinks about a wine and then I try it and try to put the words to what I taste and smell. Some things I get, but others I completely have no idea. We taste test the wines as they are fermenting, which is very difficult to see how they are going to turn out in the end as they settle but then again, I'm just starting so in about 20 years maybe I'll get it.
Day six. Friday. 12:48am
It was a cleaning and preparation day. It was the hospitality side of the winery business where we were preparing for an out of town pair of musicians so the first half of the day was all dishes and laundry and squeegeeing the floors of the barrel room. You know how hard it is to turn a workplace into a concert area? I had only one thing on my list from Robert to do and that was to transfer some wine from one barrel to another. I tried to do it around 2 but one barrel started to overflow, much to my dismay, spilling out all over the clean concert floor so I had to stop again and squeegee the floor really fast before anyone saw. I miss my dog terribly today and everything about my home. I stared at the hens for awhile. Their combs are larger than my RIRs, a phenomenon I read about as a method to release heat in warmer climates so it was interesting to see it in action. The band came for dinner and was very nice and pleasant as I set up banged and set up chairs all around them tuning. Natalie made an excellent dinner of pasta with kale and red peppers and pine nuts and good bread and squash soup. We were having a pleasant conversation about music when their old alternative rock band came up that Natalie and Robert played in the 90s and Natalie got super embarrassed by it, which of course led me to say –you think that’s embarrassing, I used to be in an all girl band with a transgendered person in the process of changing into a woman. *Insert confused looks, crickets chirping*
The concert turned out to be super nice and a very romantic setting and the few people who did come ended up liking it immensely. I was taken back by the pacing of the night being perfect, with the fiddle player holding the attention for awhile then shifting over to the guitarist who had a different style with finger picking baroque music with a new age twist. I remember one time when I was sick of all my music at my house and I went down to the library and thought that celtic music would transcend into some other form of auditory experience completely new to me. The old cd’s I found there were not bad, but nothing compared to a fiddle player surrounded by French oak barrels with fermenting wine playing his heart out and stomping on a stomp block, smiling the whole time. And yes, I ended up spending the last part of the cash that I didn’t’ blow at the little bistro on one of his cd’s. Sooo excited to play it on the way home… to see my dog, my sheep, and my sweet boy waiting for me.
It's been a few days since the interweb, so here's my little journal I've been keeping about my time in beautiful red-dirted NC
Day five. Thursday 10/08/09 6:52pm
I’m sitting at a little bisto eating a turkey something or other and drinking a microbrew oatmeal porter with THE INTERNET! They have it at the winery but I haven’t had the chance to ask the password and I’m moving out tomo morning to make room for the out of town bands. I’m staying with Chad and Lisa then and somewhere around midnight last night with the getting rid of the pesky roosters and working well past midnight, Robert asked me if I’d stay on and work through BluesFest this weekend. With a temp job waiting for me at the end of my visit, of course I happily obliged as despite a really really long day, I do like it here and the work is satisfying for the most part. The winery was open today and I actually did see a woman come in with a cardigan tied around her shoulders like Zach in saved by the bell or that one Heather in the movie Heathers. I just hid among the barrels and tried not to laugh.
I can’t help but think that there is a notable difference between the wineries in Ohio I’ve been to and this one in North Carolina. I haven’t had a chance to visit other ones around here, but the one in Virginia was the same way. It just has a different aura to it, I think possibly because the Ohio wineries are more like glorified bars where people are loud and boisterous with tons of tables and chair strewn around and a dude working behind the counter that’s been working outside all day and then just pours wine at night. Ohio has a lot more rustic wood-feeling places. The southern places are more marble and fine linen. Not sure why, but I’m sure it’s the clientele and perhaps the area too.
I had a brochure for the area with a few things starred that I wanted to do while in the area, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. There’s a barrel room concert tomorrow night with out of town musician guests to prepare for and a whole weekend of music and wine coming upon us fast. I just can’t believe it’s Thursday already. My how time flies….
Day four. Wednesday 10/07/09 1:46AM!!!!!
It’s well past one in the morning. I’ve been working since 9am. I have no idea how many hours straight that is. Everything is funny to me. I got a little bored at 4, but kept working, not realizing that we’d press out all the Frontenac and it would take us from 6ish to past midnight.
I killed chickens today. Funny how some things just follow you no matter where you go.
Day three. Tuesday 10/06/09 4:42pm
Today started out with farm fresh eggs from the hens cooing outside the kitchen window. It is raining again, but that’s ok. It’s still tshirt weather and when I see the roof over the concrete slab that we keep working under, I just keep thinking – this would never work in Ohio. I am constantly doused with water or wine or a combination of both and while my waterproof snow boots might seem a bit excessive here, they would be a necessity in the north.
After my onion omlette, we dove right in to wine making, moving the Frontenac gris from one tank and then back again, sans the gunk at the bottom that settled over the past few days. We moved the Niagara that was in the giant stainless steel tank over to another giant stainless steel tank, but there was a bunch of gunk in the bottom so… up the ladder and into the giant tank I went with a little light and a bucket of oxyclean. Seriously that stuff works so well. Cleans anything.
I have been really busy and I had to force myself to stop to take a little break for a few hours before Robert gets off work at 6:30. I think I’m learning a lot… mostly that making wine takes a lot of manual labor and a ton of scrubbing. Still fun though, I think. The ironic part of it all is that I’m so whupped by the end of the day and sick from smelling musty wine all day that I can’t even drink the stuff. It’s soooo much work. Weird.
Day two. Monday 10/05/09 8:57pm
It was seven before I got out of the cellar and collapsed on my bed. I can feel my heart beat in my feet from the concrete… no rhyming intended. Yesterday was much more hectic, long, and like a ton of grapes almost getting poured on my head. Today was more like punching down the must, where I push through the mass of crushed grapes in giant bins with a giant stainless steel plunger thing. We moved around a lot of gray bins with reds in various degrees of fermentation while the faint odor similar to things that belong in a cat box wafts up from the different bins.
We pressed the Marquette’s, which only amounted to about half of a flex tank. We sifted and transferred and sifted and transferred the Frontenac Gris, which filled a full flex tank. Then we transferred the Niagara from one giant stainless steel tank to another, which is a task where you have to take into account gravity, pressure, and trying not to let air touch it. Yeah, that’s kinda tough as pumps have a tendency to suck air while you’re waiting for that last little bit of juice to come out of the tank. The whole time I’m working with whites in the fermentation process, I’m thinking about how that movie is so full of shit if they portray characters with the ability to allow zero air to touch their chardonnay. That’s stinking nuts. Minimal I can see, maybe. But zero air? Yeah right. If you would even try for that, there would be so much waste as you’re trying to bleed the pumps, or maybe they just fermented while the pumps are still hooked up in some kind of closed system? I don’t know. I did learn that you can have wine on tap and Robert says it’s not bad as long as you have it in a sealed bladder bag similar to the inside of a box of wine. Maybe that’s how they didn’t let air touch it… a giant bladder bag? I don’t know. Seems weird, even for a perfectionist.
Anyway, I had a very lovely day, which started out a bit rainy but I got a super nice breakfast at a local bistro and I learned all about agro-chemicals. Well, maybe not all about them, but I learned a few things like how they establish re-entry time and that roundup starts degrading as soon as it hits the soil and that it works similarly to an amino acid and that there’s an additive in cigarettes to make them burn longer than straight tobacco normally would.Robert also told me that red wine benefits from oxygen while it’s the enemy to white wine. And that you let red wine sit on the skins to ferment to add color, and Frontenac is certainly not lacking in color so it shouldn’t need as long. Oh, and Frontenac stains your shirts blue because it has the red stain color in an acidic environment but once you add water the chemistry becomes more basic and it turns blue, which kinda reminds me of a pregnancy test… except that I can’t get it out of my favorite lucky chicken shirt now.
Oh, and they have chickens here too; wyandottes, reds, polishes, and a frizzle among others. The fridge is so full of eggs it looks like quiche time at my house. Between the chickens and the cool looking cat, I’m not too terribly homesick for the farm yet. I just hope my little screwy sensitive dog doesn’t fall apart while I’m gone. I miss that little mess.
Day 1. Sunday 10/04/09 10:49pm
After two days of tough picking, rain and shine, I hit the road at 8pm. Armed with a book one tape, Tomtom – my fav little gps, and a bunch of soda, I was pretty dead set on making NC at 4 in the morning if it killed me…. … but then when I thought about it, the latter was actually more of a possibility. My dad insisted on calling in one of his earned free nights at a Holiday Inn and I was too tired to object. I drove almost all the way through west VA before I hit Princeton, a little town almost on the border with only two hours left to go. I rolled in around 2 and was completely exhausted, but with my head on the pillow, my eyes just wouldn’t shut. Fueled by the same bunch of soda that got me there, I just couldn’t shut my brain off. So I flipped through the crappy tv programming that all late Saturday night insomniacs are subjected to for about an hour before the history channel doing a special on the civil war finally lulled me to sleep.
The next morning I was still pretty delirious, but grateful for a hot shower and some breakfast. I can’t imagine how crappy I would feel without that little pit stop.
I got to the winery around 11 and the truck with the grapes was set an hour behind me. It was good because we had some preparations to do first. So we sanitized the flex tanks and set up the crushing table to take the tons of Frontenac that were headed its way. I had that feeling like someone’s hands were cupped over my ears and I kept making everyone repeat what they just said. Chad could only stay until 4pm, but Lisa brought her friend Elaine who was a tremendous help.
Robert who owns and runs the winery is super friendly and really likeable. Not sure what to expect from crush, he was laid back enough to make us feel comfortable, but not so much that we didn’t know what to do.
This place smells funny. I’m not sure exactly how to describe it, just funny. Almost like mucking out a horse stall, but if a dog had been in a stall for awhile on wood chips. I keep thinking I stepped in cat poop, but I don’t find any on my shoe.
Speaking of cats, the winery cat is the most beautiful cat I’ve ever seen. His name is Noah and he’s a Bengal cat. For real. I’ve seen them in magazines, but this cat is so beautiful in real life. He’s very sweet and friendly, but his markings are very unique and defined. He’s a little larger than your ordinary cat, but not much. It’s just this very bright and striking kind of orange that’s just mesmerizing. And he’s very talkative too.
Anyway, we got the Frontenac Gris crushed and pressed. It starts out a white wine color, a bit on the green side, but then towards the end of pressing, it started bleeding a pink color once the skins were really getting crushed down. Man, Ohio grape growers just can’t catch a break.
The Frontenac was crushed and put into 4 giant gray bins to ferment. It’s a lot of Frontenacs. A lot. I hope Robert can coax them into actually tasting good as wine. He keeps saying that they have good color, but the juice is so acidic it’s hard not to pucker a bit after tasting.
Oh well, it’s ohio and we have to take what we can get….. now it’s def beyond time for me to get some sleep
There's a fly in my Chardonnay.... er, a random white grape in my Frontenac Gris.
This guy popped up in random spots along our rows of Gris, exactly 25 of them with massive clusters of white grapes blushing into rich golds in the sun. (F. Gris on right, mystery grape on left.) I've been eating them every chance I get as they have everything I like in a grape - slighly sweet with a little bite but not too sour or acidic. They are starting to show signs of bortrytis, but what isn't this time of year.
I thought perhaps we made a mistake and put some Traminettes or Vidals in there on planting day, but the foliage, stem color and new shoots look nothing like anything else in the vineyard.
The clusters are massive. The vines grow just right. All of them survived the harsh winter and late spring frost. They are easy to care for with trailing growth and very few side shoots on their fruiting wood. The weird part is that none of them have experienced the lightning winter dieback that's hit everywhere else in the vineyard, where a vine will be growing along just fine and then realize that the winter injured the truck and it no longer can support growth. It's hit everywhere else in the vineyard except for these guys. So, they are super winter hardy. Also, they aren't pushing out new blooms all the time either like the Frontenacs.
Nice golden color, excellent flavor... if you or anyone you know has any information about this grape, please let me know.
Good Morning! Bright and early on a Friday morning, I get to the vineyard on a beautiful sunny day, totally ready to cut off the fruit that I've been worrying about for the past... 5 months? Geez. Marquettes, we've had some great times together, but it's time to go.
The first order of business is getting the netting off. It has been on the vines for a few months now and the Marquettes are so vigorous that there are new shoots coming out everywhere, tendrils pulling on the netting, leaves everywhere pushing through so wrestling the netting free of the vines was going to be a chore.
But thankfully John the handy mechanic (the guy drinking coffee) rigged up a netter-get-offer that hooked up to the tractor which worked incredibly well. Granted, we still had to use one guy on either side of the vines and one guy feeding the netting on the spool and picking leaves and branches out of the netting, but I can't even imagine how hard it would have been to do by hand without his contraption.
The grape clusters were small to medium and they were somewhat hidden in dense foliage. It would have been completely impossible to harvest had we not combed them twice and thinned off the side shoots and leaf pulled... and even after all that, it was still a treasure hunt. I was trying to make a chart of the samples that I took of the Marquettes starting at the beginning of September, but all my numbers were pretty much the same - 3.15pH, TA around 10, and Brix around 23. Even my harvest numbers came out just like that pH 3.15; TA 10.3; Brix 23.5; so my line graph was pretty much flatline. We certainly let them hang on the vine a long time and the book I read said we should be fine as long as the pH didn't spike, which it never did. Towards the end, about in the final week of them hanging on the vine, they started getting attacked by everything. The birds took a lot off before we got the netting off, the frost wiped out a whole section of vines, and then in the end we had quite a few foes attacking the clusters.
We experienced a lot of rot when it got down to it and I'm glad we didn't wait another week. Next year, I'll mark the harvest for the middle of September when the numbers get around 3.15pH, 10 TA, and Brix of 23. The flavor didn't change much in the last few weeks, but then again possibly it would change the flavor of the wine.
Now I'm looking at the Frontenac numbers, which are the next batch to go and they look like they are moving in the right direction for harvest next weekend.
In the end, we got one ton off an acre of three year old grapes, which I guess isn't too bad and I hope I didn't push the vines so much that they won't come back next year. It's been such a weird season with a cool summer, almost a month of August drought, a late frost that wiped out half the buds, and ravenous birds that almost took a whole row out. I'm buttoning up my garden, just shaking my head at another weird Ohio growing season, thankful for what did grow and produce.
It's the morning of the first round of grape harvests and I'm like a kid on the first day of school. I've been up since the early morning chorus of roosters at 5am. I fed everyone in the dark and all I got were confused, sleepy looks in return. I have my salami sandwich with a fresh tomato to soggy up the bread. I made a quart of blueberry and bancha tea. I'm trying to avoid the coffee, but probably going to loose that battle. I have on my lucky test taking las vegas tshirt from my college years and my favorite ram belt.
....and now I'm ready for a long day of slinging grapes. yehaw.
On the farm there is a very well stocked apple orchard full of antique and wild apples that were planted, grafted, and cared for 3 generations of Millers ago. I think that's right... LeAnne's great grandfather was the one that planted and cared for these trees and now here I am wandering through the gnarled old branches completely loaded with unknown apples and I'm taking on the task of trying to figure out what's what. A lot of them are wild. Some of them are the most delicious apples I've ever eaten. Some I spit out and washed my mouth out. I guess my goal is putting at least a couple of names to the faces of the hundreds of trees.
Step one was marking them, which the friendly neighbor who's adept at carpentry did. Step two was picture taking and test testing... which is what this blog is all about. Well, I think I only got through half of them before I remembered that taste testers usually don't swallow what they're testing and with a belly completely full of apples I had to walk away before I ruined my love of apples. Step three will be testing their pH and sugars and whatever else you need to know about the apples that are going into the cider... which brings me to step four, making the cider and trying new blends. Oh experimentation. It brings out that scientific side of me that was extinguished with the rigors of documenting, test taking, and studying things that had no relevance to everyday life and I had no interest in learning in school. This is real and fun and delicious. It combines being outside with food, the art of pruning, the history of growing things, the physical nature of gathering, crushing, squeezing the juice, and the delicate mixture of flavors to make the perfect tasting apple cider.
...yes. I'm excited. Can't you tell?
Anyway, meet the trees. By posting on here I am hoping to find some antique apple enthusiasts who can give me some insight or point me in the right direction as to what the heck I have here. Oh, and also if anyone wants to swap cuttings of any of these, by all means let me know. I have another bunch of trees to take pictures so more to come....
Kinda sweet, not tart at all, kinda bland but an ok apple flavor
Very overripe, mealy. Possibly a transparent that went far past it's prime but is still holding on to the tree. Pretty gross right now though.
Underripe? Excellent apple flavor. Blushes with the sun?
Lots of drop. Decent flavor apple. Nothing out of the ordinary as far as taste, slightly bitter.
My what cute little apples. My how tart these cute little apples are. Possibly super underripe. Very small apples but they really have a lot of apple flavor.
Excellent yield. Mild sweetness with an excellent tart bite, very good apple flavor.
Excellent yield. Very similar to #6 as far as taste and coloration goes.
A lot had dropped. Interesting flavor. Red ones hit the ground. Some green small tart ones on the tree. Not sweet, more tart and apple flavor, but a little bitter.
#10 Decent production. *** Very sweet!!! *** Not tart at all. Excellent apple flavor. Big beautiful tree.
Possibly same as #10, sweet and very productive.
Lots of drop. Poor shaped tree and crowded from all sides. Very tart! Nice apple flavor but somewhat bitter aftertaste. Maybe underripe?
Two trees in one! Both very established, but the red is so bitter it hurts. Possibly very underripe. Very bitter, decent size and excellent production. The yellow one is similar to #12, very tart as well. Definitely a graft where both types are very productive on one tree.
Odd shape. Shaded. Low production, lots of drop, pretty tart.
Pretzel shaped tree. All apples dropped and covered in wasps. Looks like they dropped awhile ago.
Blushes in the sun. So tart!!!! Maybe underripe? Apples are still pretty small and hold on the tree very well.
Heavy producer. Tastes like an apple, but bland. Nothing really remarkable.
*18* Heavy producer. Beautiful apples. Amazing flavor. Not terribly sweet but great tart apple taste with little to no bitterness. Very juicy! Good enough for the table!
No apples.
Lots of drop. Very tart but very concentrated apple flavor.
Two types of apples on one tree. Yellow apples are small and very tart, butter and hard. The red apples are not too sweet or tart but has a lot of apple taste. Maybe overripe?
*** Delicious. Perfect blend of sweet and tart. Ready now. Amazing flavor. Lots of juice. Maybe the same as 25 - 28?
Small wild apples. Lots have dropped. The ones still on the tree are sour and bitter.
***Huge apples! Excellent for eating! Large and well balanced with nice juicy flavor, just the right amount of tart and sweet. Would put these on my table with pride. Really want to propagate this tree and find out what it is exactly.
There are a group of trees which I think are all the same. They don't look like much but the flavor of this apple is exquisite. Marty says they might be Rhode Island Greening. All trees are producing heavily, even the one that is almost parallel to the ground that when I first saw, I wondered why they heck they wouldn't cut it down. Now that it's producing these amazing apples, there's no way I would think of cutting it down either! Very sweet with just a little tartness and excellent apple flavor. We have plenty of them so I think this should be the staple behind our cider and I want to graft more of these and take some for my orchard at home. These trees are huge and still producing like crazy! Even the trees with bad form are still producing heavily.
After the Rhode Island Greenings, I didn't think that I could taste another apple, but this one isn't bad. Extremely sweet, but kinda bland. Probably the closest to a dessert apple yet though.
Dropped it's entire crop.
Overripe, mealy and unpalatable.
Decent production. Pretty sweet and nice apple flavor.
* Huge apples, shaded but still producing. Excellent for eating, but getting mealy. Very sweet.
Tart tart tart! but not bitter. Small apples
Dropped. Very low production for being in such a prime spot.
Ok, that's it for one day. If you or anyone you know has any information about these apples, please contact me. Oh, or if you just want to stop by to sample some apples, by all means, please do. I'm going to take a couple days off before I go back for seconds. Still plenty of apple trees left to try.
It was Swiss Heritage Winery and Broad Run Cheese House, a quaint little building packed full of lace, old hollywood memorobilia, and cheese serving ladies wearing traditional dresses.
