More than six years into this cidery concept, it’s hard to believe that we haven’t yet put apples and grapes together in a beverage.
But at last, that’s about to change.
Introducing Petit Manchurian, an apple-grape wine collaboration with our friends from Early Mountain Vineyards!
With cider still in the early stages of its revival, many casual beverage fans don’t realize that cider production is much more aligned with wine than with beer. No brewing here; it’s a cool fermentation of raw fruit juice – like white wine, but using apples instead of grapes. We even have a farm winery license issued by the Commonwealth. So what finally got us thinking about an apple & grape hybrid?
A big part of it was Wild Honey, our current bestseller. This collaboration with Garden Grove Brewing is a cyser – a co-fermentation of apple juice and honey, kind of like a cider/mead hybrid. Wild Honey was the first large-scale production put together by our current cidermaker, Taylor Benson, who has been intrigued by winemaking for several years. If apple and honey work well together, he thought, why not try apple and grape?
Early Mountain Vineyards was a no-brainer pick for the collaboration, as they have been one of our best friends in the industry since our opening. The original concept developed by Taylor, Courtney, and Ben at Early Mountain would blend the winery’s Petit Manseng grape juice with our Manchurian Crab apple juice in a dessert-style cider.
But the best-laid plans of collaborating wineries and cideries often go awry. (That’s the famous line, right?) Early Mountain’s Petit Manseng is typically a dry wine, and our Manchurian Crab didn’t have nearly the sugar content this year as it did last year… so Petit Manchurian turned out to be a pleasant balance of sweet and dry, about 1.0% residual sugar, with a hefty 10% ABV and light carbonation.
We look forward to sharing this unique collaboration with the world!
-Brian Ahnmark
