Photos by Little Outdoor Giants

On a frigid January afternoon at West Brookfield’s Ragged Hill Orchard, the trees are bare; the air is still. Inside the steamy hilltop bottling room, Steve Garwood and Anne Garwood, the father-daughter team behind Ragged Hill Cider, are tasting pink bubbles.

“It’s hard to get the carbonation just at the perfect level for a pet-nat,” says Anne—shorthand for “pétillant naturel,” a French term that roughly translates to naturally sparkling. “So we’re opening up bottles to see where they’re at and the cider is just ... it’s unbelievably delicious.”

The apple-raspberry co-ferment—balanced, bone-dry, complex—doesn’t drink like cider.

“This is our native wine,” says Steve. “We can grow apples here. Grapes don’t grow really well here, but we can make this out of apples.”

As a teenager, Steve worked on a West Brookfield dairy farm a mile from Ragged Hill, where “the farmer always had a barrel of cider in his basement.” Local farmers brought their homegrown apples to a cider press down the road and traded them for juice. Apples were a part of rural life but until the “cider revolution” in the late ’90s, hard cider hardly existed in the United States. When it arrived, most of it didn’t taste like much. “They flavor with various syrups, sugars, so making fruit-cooler kind of things,” says Steve. “What I always think is, ‘Why are they bothering making cider?’”

A longtime home brewer and winemaker, his focus turned toward developing a New England–style cider that reflected the glacial tilled central Massachusetts soil, the northern climate and the fruit that grows well there. English-style ciders tended to be bitter and brash; French cider was light and sweet; Spanish-style ciders tended to be funky. New England ciders could be austere, clean and bright, reflecting the flint and slate in the soil.

“I look for models in the world of wine as a starting point for what a cider can become. How can I develop a certain flavor profile? So, for instance, the starting point for our Honeycrisp cider is like a late-harvest Riesling that’s sweet, but it tastes like fruit. It doesn’t taste like sugar, it tastes like grapes. In the Honeycrisp, it’s like that but you're getting the sweetness of apple.”

When Steve started to consider making cider commercially, he found an enthusiastic partner in Keith Arsenault, who owns the orchard where all the apples are grown, pressed and fermented using 100% solar power. In 2013 Anne moved back to West Brookfield from San Francisco, where she worked in PR, to head up the cidery’s marketing efforts. The three are partners in the business.

This year their Pommes d’Or earned a prestigious Good Food Award—chosen in a blind tasting by a panel of experts and vetted for sustainability. The Jonagold, Gold Rush and Golden Delicious apples used to make Pommes d’Or aren’t traditional cider apples. “But I could tell early on that they had a good character to them,” says Steve. “All of them have a similar flavor profile and the character of each comes through even after fermentation.” The French oak used in the fermentation amplifies the flavor of the apples rather than disguising it.

Their thoughtful, intentional approach affords apple varieties the consideration typically given to wine grapes. An upcoming release made with heritage apples (Roxbury Russet, Golden Russet, Dabinett) exhibits the astringency and the tannins of a red wine. Their award-winning ice cider uses a traditional New England technique: freezing the juice in winter to concentrate the sugar and flavor.

Last year Ragged Hill added a tasting room where, in season, visitors can sample their flagship dry, semi-dry and dessert styles and new releases amid the trees that produced the juice, tasting the soil they stand on. They’re working on a unique, higher-alcohol cider made with the concentrated juice used in ice wine, “something along the lines of a nice white wine.” The cider tastes like apples—but like other fruits, too, with hints of pineapple, like an unoaked Chardonnay.

“This is how we do innovation,” says Anne, “rather than thinking about what flavors we can add. It’s, like, ‘What can we do with apples?’ This is what we can do.”

raggedhillcider.com

This story appeared in the Spring 2022 issue.