Amy's Ice Cider Experience

Day 0—January 5, 2010

Hi all,

    I am a freshman at Harvard College, the alma mater of Eleanor and Albert Leger, Eden Ice Cider Winery’s proud owners.  I found this January internship through Harvard’s online career portal and thought the prospect of a few weeks on an isolated farm in Vermont would be a nice break from life in busy Cambridge, Massachusetts.  I applied on December 16^th and heard back the very next day.  Eleanor interviewed me via Skype, and she generously offered the position to me—room, board, transportation, and the learning opportunity of a lifetime.  I flew from Madison, Wisconsin, about two hours from my hometown of Onalaska, WI, to the Boston Logan Airport where Eleanor picked me up.  She was also picking up Inaki Otegui Gaztelumendi at the airport.  Inaki is an expert wine taster from San Sebastian, a gastronomically and economically rich city in the Basque Country of Spain.  He was inspired by a taste of ice cider a few years ago and decided that he wanted to learn more about the process.  Eden Ice Cider turned up first on a Google search of "ice cider," and he contacted Eleanor offering to work at no cost as he observed their production process in their second year, 2008.  He is back again this year to help the Leger family with the 2009 batch, which will be almost three times the size of that of 2008.

    Although Eleanor did not ask me to, I wanted to write this blog not only to record my experiences as an intern at Eden Ice Cider Winery but also to promote ice cider.  As Eleanor explained to me, ice cider is a unique dessert wine made by pressing apples, letting the juice freeze in the heavy Vermont snow, and then taking the most concentrated quarter of the mixture and fermenting it.  However, it is not the same as hard cider.  Ice cider is sweet due to its high percentage of residual sugar (15% in Eden Ice Cider) while hard cider is fermented until all the sugar is converted to alcohol.  Ice cider can accompany buttery desserts whereas hard cider tends to be consumed in lieu of beer.  In short, ice cider is the classy way to drink spiked apple juice.

    It was a long three and a half hour drive from Boston, Massachusetts, to West Charleston, Vermont, but Eleanor, Inaki, and I have a big day ahead of us prepping the equipment for fermentation.  Until tomorrow!

Amy M. Yin

 

Day 10

The repairman came this morning, although that was the only bit of luck we had today. Ben drank some of the apple concentrate from a cup with highly toxic chemical residue and the sugar level of the melting concentrate is so low that Eleanor is starting to worry that there will be no ice cider this year. Fortunately, Ben is fine and Eleanor is devising a new strategy for the melting. At first Ben had felt flushed (although later he attributed it to psychological panic) and ran upstairs to show me the chemical label in case he passed out. I am so glad he is okay because we couldn’t find the number for Poison Control anywhere in the phonebook. There was an emergency contacts page left blank to fill in the number, but no actual digits anywhere in the white or yellow pages. Thankfully, my own remedy worked: thoughtful discussion of high school nutrition standards, three large glasses of water, and a piece of my homemade bread, and he was back working in less than an hour. 

Ben and the repairman had worked solo for most of the morning. I was clinking along on the computer while Eleanor drove Inaki to Groton, Vermont to help Mark and Nicole Simakaski, her friends from the Vermont Wine and Grapes Council, blend their first batch of mead. Eleanor and I met up with the Simakaski family and Inaki later for dinner at Elements, a restaurant in St. Johnsbury with a focus on local foods. Mark and Nicole were not quite what I was expecting when I pictured a honey/wine-making couple. They and their toddler August are certainly sweet, but they are refreshingly young in an industry full of veterans. They met while both studying chemical engineering at Drexel University in Philedelphia and took several demanding jobs before joining the PeaceCorps. Inaki definitely appreciated that they are both fluent in Spanish from their PeaceCorps work and because Mark studied French cooking in Argentina. They have been working with honey for the last ten years and moved to Vermont two years ago to open Artesano, a wine store off Route 302. Although the location is remote (although not quite as remote as Eden’s Orchards), they still have customers stop for ice cream and bottles of wine on their way to the national park. Now they are in the process of aging and blending their fermented honey water, hence the need for Inaki’s tasting abilities. 

I have to say, having dinner with four wine connoisseurs is quite an amusing experience. We went through three bottles of red wine only to conclude that all three were less than satisfactory. The wine selection was so limited that it didn’t include Eden Ice Cider, a wine that has entered the wine lists of upscale restaurants across Vermont and New York. 

I can’t believe how fast my internship has gone—tomorrow is my last day in Eden. I need to rest up so that I can make the most of it. 

Sweet dreams of Ice Cider! 

Amy

 

Day 9

    That indeterminate time the door repairman was supposed to arrive this morning ended up being never.  As a result, we couldn’t close the barn door and turn on the heat—Inaki and Eleanor almost froze melting the frozen ice cider in the basement today.

     The first batch of ice cider, from 2007, was too sweet for Eleanor and Albert’s tastes, so they decreased the level of residual sugar in last year’s batch.  Now, they think they cut the sugar level too low and are trying to make this year’s wine not as sweet as 2007 but sweeter than last year; unfortunately the apples just don’t seem to have the same sugar content as they did in 2008.  The melting process has slowed to a drip—Eleanor said it was “like watching paint dry, only it smells better.”

    I, on the other hand, am very excited about my work.  Eleanor has laid the task out just as she would at her former businesses—I’m going to create a storyline, PowerPoint and everything. I'm skipping the meadry tomorrow to work on my presentation, but I'm sure Inaki will help the couple sort out the tastes just fine without me.

Day 8

    The melting has begun!  After eight days of preparations and hurdle jumping, we have finally started collecting the first drops of sweet, concentrated apple juice.  The weather was a chilly 2 degrees out last night and froze the Macintosh apples enough so that the part that didn’t freeze was sweet enough for fermentation (the Macintosh was at its expected high of 30 brix, but we will wait for the other varieties to rise to 35 brix of apple-y sweetness).  We were set back by a minor encounter of the forklift with the barn door—the door was almost ripped off the hinges while the forklift has almost no damage.  Made of steel (or aluminum??).  Eleanor called a repair service and they will come at some indeterminate time tomorrow morning, but no worries, the melting shall go on.  We might have to do a bit more manual labor, but strong backs build strong character.
    I guess that’s easy for me to say, given that I wasn’t in the barn at all today.  While Inaki, Eleanor, and Ben fought the cold in sixty-minute intervals, I was comfortably seated in front of the computer. I’m doing a profit-stream analysis for 2009 to see which channel, whether it be retailers, wholesale, distant events, or customers who place shipments, yields the highest profit.  I’m interested in finance and entering the corporate world, so this kind of data analysis was great job-training.  I already love the number crunching, although I’m starting to get sore because I’ve been glued to my seat all morning.    
    Between running numbers and errands, I didn’t have time to set up the Facebook account, but I promise it’ll be up soon.  It’s supposed to be another frigid night in the Green Mountain State, so I’m going to curl up to the rest of The Kite Runner in front of Eleanor’s lively fireplace.  Until tomorrow!

Day 7

    Quite day at the farm.  In the morning Inaki and Eleanor moved the totes of cider completely outside the green barn (the “Juice Caboose”) to face the coldest day since I’ve been here.  If that doesn’t completely freeze the cider, then the Vermont winter will have failed us.  However, we are all crossing our fingers and hope that melting tomorrow with be a go.

    While Inaki and Eleanor were in the barn, I set up the blog—thanks to all who have checked it out—and tomorrow I will create a Facebook page for Eden Ice Cider, so if you like alcoholic apple beverages, add us as a friend!

Day 6—January 11, 2010

    Today I met so many interesting people.  For lunch we hosted several affiliates from one of Vermont’s top ten restaurants, The Kitchen Table Bistro, along with KC from the Shelburne Vineyard.  The Kitchen Table Bistro in Richmond has a fabulous selection of American dishes and an equally great selection of wines, including (of course) Eden Ice Cider.  They are very careful to support Vermont and buy locally as much as possible.  Although you won’t find it on their website, The Kitchen Table Bistro has done just a fabulous job in house promoting our novel beverage, so in appreciation we served up lamb from Eleanor’s neighbors at Hope Farm with Hope Farm’s last wheel of sheep cheese (although they will continue selling their succulent lamb meat), in addition to Cabot cheddar and foie gras.  Steve Atkins, the restaurant’s chef-owner, was incredibly nice, and he even took the time to ask about my college and major.  Although he doesn’t say much, he has a great presence around him that must be great to have in the kitchen.  His part-owner Neal Johnston and his wife Kelly Johnston are also very interesting.  Neal came in for dinner one night and, with the help of a few connections and good timing, left as the Dining Room Manager.  His wife is also familiar with the industry—she used to sell wine in Los Angeles and at the Playboy mansion.  Apparently Hugh Hefner is quite charming and the bunnies love the wine Rabbit Ridge.  KC and her friends were also quite charming.  She makes wine, but hers is from grapes not apples, and had many experiences to share.

    Directly following lunch, we departed for Montpelier for Eleanor’s monthly meeting of the Vermont Grape and Wine Council, of which she is treasurer.  They are a group of wine-makers who get together to discuss how to best conduct business and maintain the pride of fine wine in Vermont.  Inaki sat in the meeting, but English is his third language, after Basque and Castellan Spanish.  After the two-and-a-half-hour meeting, he told me his head was spinning from the inflow of knowledge and English. 

    Ken and Gail Albert, owners of Shelburne vineyard, joined us for some Mexican cuisine at Julio’s.  They are quite warm and friendly people and are generously selling Eden Ice Cider in their fancy new tasting room in Shelburne.  According to Eleanor, they are her best customers.  Vermont law was recently changed to allow wineries to sample other Vermont producers’ wines, so the Legers do not have to take on the added cost of a tasting room and publicity but still have the chance to get their product known.

    Tomorrow, we will either tour a mead-making facility or file paperwork (bet you can’t guess which one I’m gunning for).  For those of you, like me, who have heard of mead but don’t know what it is, mead is an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey and water.  In this harsh climate, honey, and apples, is a great ingredient for wholesome Vermont goodness.  While ice cider is a baby in the industry, mead is the “ancestor of all fermented drinks.”  If we ask the gods nicely, maybe tomorrow they will let us in on their divine secret, the ability to turn honey into wine.

Day 5—January 10, 2010

    What a day.  We were supposed to begin fermentation today and even had a journalist and a photographer working for Vermont Life come to observe and take pictures of the process, but the juice wasn’t sweet enough.  Just as salt melts icy roads, sugar lowers the melting point of water, so the plan was to capture the super-sweet cider that melted below 0 degrees Celsius and ferment that.  Everything was all ready to start converting the cider to wine until we tested the sugar content.  The refractometer, a fancy tool that indicates the percentage of sucrose of a solution by weight in “brix,” reported only 24 brix.  We can’t ferment the concentrate because we need at least 34 brix to maintain the sweet, indulgent nature of the wine.  The reason the concentrate is not as sweet as last year is because the cider did not freeze enough.  Instead of leaving the “totes” of juice outside as before, Eleanor and Albert built a barn, the “Juice Caboose,” to hold their increased amounts of concentrate.  However, the lack of exposure to the elements (i.e. wind) raised the temperature so that not enough of the solution froze, leaving us potentially days behind in production.  Albert and Inaki are rearranging the totes so that they are farther apart and are keeping the doors open for better circulation.  If the weather stays chilly, we may be able to start fermentation on Wednesday.

    The day was not completely lost.  We entertained both Melissa Passanen and Daria Bishop for next year’s winter edition of Vermont Life.  Melissa took notes as we explained the process of making ice cider, and Daria took some great “action” shots.  We followed the morning in the basement with a beautiful, leisurely lunch (without the time pressure of beginning fermentation).  Melissa brought some fabulous Vermont sausage and Willow Hill cheese in addition to homemade bread and cookies to accompany Eleanor’s homemade curried carrot soup and foie gras she brought from France, and Inaki provided a bottle of his own wine he made in Spain, Malus Mama.  Although his wine comes from apples, it does not go through the same freezing process that Eden does, which is reasonable given the climate of Spain.  The slightly more acidic wine was delicious with the foie gras, so we hope that Inaki can continue producing more and hit the market with his product once he returns to Spain.

    Melissa and Daria are gone now, so I think we will try to finish the day up with some data analysis and paperwork.  We sleep tonight with the hope that the weather stays cold.

Day 4—January 9, 2010

    The weekend has arrived, yet farm work knows no end.  I was so tired last night from all the cleaning that I crashed around 10:30pm and Eleanor let me sleep in until 9 the next morning.  I don’t know where she gets all the energy; she considers ice cider her retirement, but she never stops working.  We followed up yesterday’s cleaning by running a peroxide mix through the tanks and then rinsing with distilled water.  Tomorrow, we will begin melting the frozen juice and collecting the concentrate to put in our newly sanitized tanks.

    Albert, Eleanor’s husband, just arrived a few minutes ago from New Hampshire.  I don’t know how this couple manages the distance, especially for all these years.  Their story is quite romantic.  Albert is from Canada.  After attempting to make the Canadian Olympic Cross-Country Ski Team, he enrolled at a junior college in Quebec. 

    One day he was talking to his brother-in-law who was a Harvard alumnus, and he told Albert that he was too smart to waste his time at a junior college and that he should apply to Harvard.  He did, and got in with a full scholarship.  He and Eleanor then met on a freshman pre-orientation program, backpacking throughout Maine.  Eleanor dated a heavyweight English Canadian rower, among others in college, who was on the backpacking trip with her, but their senior year Albert and Eleanor finally got together and the Christmas after graduation, he proposed.  They never lived together before they got married.  Directly after college, he studied at the University of New Brunswick for his Master’s degree and she worked for Bain in Boston, finding success in the corporate world.  They had their wedding and honeymooned in Canada, but on the way back across the border, immigration stopped them.  They had to pull out his student identification and all the paperwork to prove that yes, they were married, but no, Albert didn’t have a reason to be in America.  Eleanor is still an American citizen, and he is living in the U.S. on a green card while their children enjoy dual citizenship.

    Albert finished up his Master’s degree in Canada, and they both moved to Baltimore so that he could study at John’s Hopkins and Eleanor could obtain an MBA at Wharton, the business school at University of Pennsylvania.  She commuted to Philadelphia during the weekday and stayed with her aunt and uncle in Pennsylvania and then spent weekends in Baltimore with Albert. Not ideal, but better than driving seven hours across international borders to see each other.

    Between her first and second year of business school, Eleanor had Caroline, their first child.  Eleanor took off a year and a half to raise Caroline and picked up an investment banking job in Baltimore.  After two years, they moved to Philadelphia so that Eleanor could finish her MBA while raising one child and being pregnant with another.  Tom, their last child, was born between two midterms.  Eleanor had Tom on February 16, 1991; friends visited to drop off flowers, baby toys, and class notes, and the very next day Eleanor took her exam. 

    Then, with a Ph.D. in geology and an MBA in hand, the couple took on New York City.  Eleanor worked for Mercer in management consulting in their financial services practices and Albert at Columbia University, working toward his post-doc.  After eighteen months, Albert finished his post-doc and worked at the Museum of Natural History as a curatorial fellow.

    Albert became bored with research and decided to follow his passion as an educator.  The couple moved to New Jersey so that he could take a job at Montclair Kimberly Academy while Eleanor commuted to New York.  Albert doesn’t have his teaching license, but private high schools are quite receptive to Ph.D.-holding scientists.  In 1999 Eleanor quit the insurance company that she was working for and joined a small startup in Connecticut.  The family yet again moved their lives, and Albert took a job at Hopkins in New Haven, one of the nation’s oldest high schools  (I actually have friends at Harvard who went to school there and know their kids).

    Life seemed good because the family was all in one state, but then Intuit bought the small startup and Eleanor found herself flying to California every other week to work.  Albert has always fully supported Eleanor’s busy corporate schedule and hectic work weeks, but, as Eleanor told me, his only requirement was that they be together.  She quit her job at Intuit and the family moved to New Hampshire.  The move served the whole family well—Albert taught chemistry at Philips Exeter, Caroline and Tom received free tuition at the nation’s premier prep school, and Eleanor had the freedom to work remotely on independent consulting projects, making the occasional short journey to New York to put out any fires.  They had always loved food and wine, and when they tasted ice cider while visiting Albert’s sister in Montreal (ice cider is considerably more popular among our neighbors to the north), they knew they had found their retirement.  They purchased a farm in West Charleston, and although the students will miss their humorous, intelligent professor, Albert will start working at the winery fulltime after this school year.

    So that’s how Eden's owners got from two Harvard degrees to making wine.  It’s not exactly a relaxing retirement, but they are the kind of people who love doing stuff.  They see the wine industry not as a job but as a way of life.  They get to meet people and talk about their favorite topic, food.  Here in Vermont, they have a beautiful house, two grown children, and each other.  No wonder they call it Eden.

 

Day 3—January 8, 2010

    We had a very productive, if not tedious, day of paperwork and then cleaning in the basement of Eleanor and Albert’s house in Vermont.  The morning I spent charting fermentation data from 2008.  We are looking for a relationship between the temperature, density, and brix of sugar as they vary throughout the different batches and mixes of apples.  I had fun exploring Excel, but it was nice to head down to the basement after lunch for some intense cleaning.  Inaki and I cleaned all the tanks, first pumping through a caustic cleaner and then warm water to rinse.  As simple as that sounds, when you are dealing with such a large quantity of everything, things get tricky.  We used a very large pump and hose with a diameter the size of my face to get the water in and then good old-fashioned gravity to suck water out.  After a whole day of cleaning, everyone can rest assured that Eden Ice Cider is a very, very clean wine.

    Afterward, Inaki and Eleanor sampled the currently fermenting tanks of concentrate.  The owners of two of the orchards who supply the apples for Eden had requested a few batches of ice cider early and with apples only from their respective orchards, so Eleanor and Albert had begun the fermentation for those batches last week in smaller totes.  The yeast for the fermentation eats the sugar in the apple juice and releases CO2, which causes the lids to rise and an unusual looking brown foam to spew out.  In about eight weeks Eleanor and Albert will stop the fermentation at 10% alcohol, leaving about 15% residual sugar, and then will set the batches outside for five days to kill off the yeast.  After the yeast has all died, the concentrate is set outside to mellow for four months.  Then, they bottle and cork the sweet wine just in time for the holiday season.

    Still no Internet, but I will continue writing every day and will post this blog as soon possible!

Day 2—January 7, 2010

    We had a pretty relaxed day here at the Eden Orchards.  We got up around 8am, and Inaki and I cleaned and washed the basement while Eleanor  had a conference call with the Vermont Culinary Tourism Council.  She and six other wine owners are working to see how to best showcase Vermont’s bountiful wine selection on the Internet.  She spent the morning reading eleven different proposals from different companies offering to do the job, and during the conference this morning the group narrowed the proposals down to three.

    As I mentioned before, we had to travel to Newport, a “city” about twenty minutes away from the farm.  The car ride was absolutely gorgeous—majestic pines, branches heavy with snow; quaint houses dotting the mountainous terrain; small animals footprints alongside the smooth ATV tracks.  I’ve never been to Vermont in the winter before, and I am so glad that I get to see Vermont in all her beauty.

    Eleanor dropped me off at Shaw’s (a grocery store you will not find in the Midwest) and promised to pick me up after she and Inaki stopped by the bank and then the hardware store for tubing.  We have visitors on Sunday from Vermont Life.  They want to feature Eden Ice Cider in next year’s winter edition, but they write the articles one year ahead of time and also wanted to see wine-making in action.  I purchased some Cabot Private Stock Cheddar Cheese (they didn’t have the Vintage Collection that Eleanor likes because of its sharper taste) and water crackers to serve with the foie gras Eleanor picked up last time she was in France.  Eleanor is also very concerned about issues surrounding the environment and health, so I tried to buy only organic/free-trade products to mimic the rest of her kitchen.  Even Eden’s laboratory is stocked with organic chemicals and cleaners.  Albert and Eleanor use real cork from cork trees instead of plastic, as is the norm for wine bottling these days.  They buy the cork from Portugal to promote the cork tree industry—they don’t want the cork trees to become obsolete because so few wine producers are willing to invest in the more expensive material.  I see Eden as more of a social enterprise than a moneymaking machine—Eleanor and Albert make ice cider because they love food, wine, and Vermont, and Eden Ice Cider is a product of their passion and dedication to these things.

    I’m waxing poetic about a luxury good, but I can’t help but get into the process the longer I am here.  Rural life does has its disadvantages though.  Our Internet connection just got cut off—thank Wild Blue for providing the (lack of) service.  If we are lucky, we will be reconnected within the next three days, but until then, business transactions are remitted to Exeter, New Hampshire, where Albert teaches Chemistry to high school students at the nation’s best prep school.  Eleanor just went over the numbers for production this evening—21,819 gallons total for the year, up from 7,500 gallons produced last year.  She was shuffling numbers around, trying to figure out which varieties of apple concentrate should go in which size tank, and was starting to stress out when I pointed out to her that one of her tanks was above capacity.  Fortunately, Inaki noticed that she had only figured in 3 1400-gallon tanks instead of 4.  Whew!  Crisis averted for today.  Tomorrow will bring its new and exciting problems.

Day 1—January 6, 2010

    We had a great day, incredibly productive although incredibly exhausting.  Ben Applegate (yes, that's really his last name), an apple expert who has been helping Eleanor and Albert cultivate their infant apple trees, arrived at about 9am and got to work immediately.  I was surprised by how small the operation was.  All the ice cider is produced in the basement of Eleanor and Albert’s house in West Charleston.  Eleanor’s family has roots in West Charleston, so after Eleanor retired from her busy life in the corporate world, the couple bought 150 acres of farmland with both the desire to live in and bring prosperity to Vermont.  Living with Eleanor, I can just tell that she loves Vermont because she sincerely wants her product to be labeled a Vermont product and to bring pride to the Green Mountain State.  All the apples that they buy are from Vermont orchards, and they take care to call and sell to Vermont restaurants and vendors before anyone else.  Fortunately enough, the state gives love as it receives.  Last year when Eleanor and Albert were calling vendors to feature their products, if they did not explicitly say that they were headquartered in Vermont, the vendors would become very busy.  Once Eden made known that it was a Vermont product, the vendors gladly welcomed Eleanor and Albert to do a sampling.  Of the 27 that tried Eden Ice Cider, 26 ended up putting in orders.  The demand for 2008 was so great that the Leger’s have fewer than 100 bottles left out of the 7,500 they corked last year.

    Back to the day’s activities.  As I mentioned before, all the wine is fermented in the basement of the house, but we haven’t quite gotten to that stage yet.  As of current, the juice from the pressed apples is sitting outside as several large blocks of ice.  The frozen masses are separated by apple variety, and the different species will be mixed together at the end.  Strangely enough, it’s the cheaper, less expensive apples, such as Macintosh and Empire, that give ice cider its fundamental taste, whereas the expensive, well-known varieties, such as HoneyCrisp, appeal to customers because of its delicious taste when consumed raw but offer a much more straightforward ice cider.  However, while Macintosh tends to be a staple of any ice cider, Eleanor and Albert use Roxbury Russet apples to distinguish their wine.  Roxbury Russet apples, the oldest American apple variety discovered in Roxbury, Massachusetts in the early 1600s, are sweeter, more acidic, and more than twice as expensive as the classic Macintosh, but Eden invests in these pricy apples to give the wine a rich, full taste.

    There is one 100 year-old red barn that came with the property and another green barn that Eleanor and Albert just built, fondly nicknamed “The Juice Caboose” by Eleanor’s father.  We spent quite a fair bit of time lugging equipment from the basement to these lovely barns in the 24⁰F Vermont winter, but it was satisfying work.  The huge 375-, 250-, and 160-gallon tanks in the basement also had to be moved from one corner to another, and while we moved the bulky pieces, we cleaned the floor and apple residue left from the year before.  I am very glad we had Ben and Inaki aboard because the tubing and hose were extremely heavy.  We managed to move everything and set up all the apparatuses by 5:30pm.  Tomorrow we will head to Newport to pick up some tubing and groceries, and by the end of the week we should be able to begin the fermentation process!