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 16th
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
