The Fizz #22: Redfield Cider's Olivia Maki is driven by the intersection of wine and cider, educating consumers on a beverage taking the U.S. by storm
Olivia and I talk about how wine and cider intersect, how climate change is affecting the cider market, and her dream for new cider consumers in the states.
Olivia Maki is the co-founder of Redfield Cider, a small bar and bottle shop in Oakland, CA stocking some of the world’s most delicious and the United States’ newest and most exciting ciders. She’s a consumer educator, a community builder, and an agriculture enthusiast and educator leading important conversations on climate change and how it relates to our local beverage industry. We jumped on a call over Zoom.
Olivia’s passion for the industry and for her local California cider community is immediately clear. In this interview, we spoke about consumer education around cider, how the industry is growing, and how climate change is affecting how both wine and cider makers consider their next steps.
Margot: I’m excited to hear a bit about how you started Redfield Cider. How did the space come about?
Olivia: I co-own the shop with my husband Mike, and we’ve been working in the beverage industry for over a decade. The food and beverage world has always been our career path. We got really into cider 7-8 years ago. We met up with the folks at Tilted Shed Ciderworks in Sonoma County and I remember being really excited about their cider—this tastes like wine! We hunted around always trying to find good cider and talk to people about cider and decided to open our own shop because we hadn’t really seen people curating their cider selection. There were shops who would bring in any cider, just to have a crazy cider selection. Or you’d go to a bar and there’d be one cider, and that cider had to represent all ciders, the whole range of what cider could be.
Can you imagine going to a restaurant and having just one wine on the menu? It was around those frustrations that we wanted to open our own spot and focus really heavily on curation and provide a space for people to come and learn about cider and taste cider that we deemed to be delicious and thoughtful and sustainable.
M: What do you buying practices look like, and how do you deem a cider delicious?
O: For us it’s all about transparency. If we talk to a wine or cider rep or maker, they have to tell us where the fruit is coming from. That could be fruit from Washington or from an orchard up the road—they just have to be honest about where it’s coming from and why they sourced it that way. There’s a real shortage of access to cider-specific fruit as the industry has grown—it’s now a billion dollar industry around the world. There hasn’t been a pace to grow apples fast enough to make cider using cider-specific fruit. As a stopgap, people have been using more heirloom varieties or dessert varieties of apples, and that’s not inherently a bad thing, it’s just important to know what that fruit is.
We have a strict “no assholes” policy—if someone is known to be racist or sexist, we’re not going to carry that product no matter how good it is. It needs to taste good. Taste good is obviously a personal thing, but Mike and I have a really wide range of what we think is delicious. It could be something sweet and fruity or totally dry and really acetic, or maybe even still. We want it to be delicious—nothing obviously fucked up. This all might seem obvious, but it’s not necessarily obvious for a lot of retailers in the Bay Area and beyond, where they’re not asking these questions and trying to understand if there’s integrity in the product.
M: I’m just starting to think about transparency with cider. In wine, I generally know the areas which they grapes are coming from, which grapes they are, etc. With cider—there’s not a lot of information about what you’re drinking. Why is that information important for consumers?
O: This has been something that has been plaguing the cider industry. How do we get consumers that are new to the beverage to buy cider they’re going to like? In wine, folks gravitate toward a grape—I know that I like Pinot Noir, so that’s what I’ll look for in the shop. There’s not really a way to do that in the same way with cider. There has been a focus on trying to do varietal specific ciders. Kingston Black, for example, is a classic cider apple, it makes a delicious single varietal cider. There’s not a lot of access to it though, and most ciders, if you just use a single fruit, aren’t actually that good.
Cider is really good when it’s blended—you can take the acidity from one apple and the tannin from another, and ferment them together or blend them. You can’t really do the same consumer shift in their mindset, though, because folks won’t come in and say “I’d like a Kingston Black cider, please”. There’s not a lot of access to that, and it won’t necessarily be the best cider.
There’s been a struggle around how to market cider in a way people will understand because it’s a very nuanced process. For us, sometimes it’s best done regionally—there are some really classic regions, and granted this is a really Eurocentric way to talk about cider making, in Spain, France, and the U.K. It’s so embedded in the history of those countries, there are really specific styles that come out of that. English and Spanish cider, although there are variations, you generally know what you’re going to get. When it comes to the U.S., there are no rules, though. For us it’s been about learning about different producers—we try everything before we bring it in and we write our own product descriptions.
M: What are some of the challenges that you’re seeing in the cider community right now? Where are some opportunities for growth?
O: There’s this gap between consumer perception, awareness, and product knowledge. That’s something the American Cider Association is trying to work on—is there a lexicon we’re developing for consumers? The New York State Cider Association put a dryness scale together so that cans and bottles can have dryness indicators on them. This is a real sticking point for a lot of consumers, and something I hear at Redfield more than anything else. Consumers say they want a dry cider, but they actually want something with a little bit of sweetness. I love cider with a bit of sweetness. Consumers are reacting to mass produced cider which is super sweet. They’re really saying “I don’t want Angry Orchard”. We have to backtrack from there and talk to them about what dryness means to them.
M: What kind of consumer education do you think there’s space for? What kind of resources do you wish were available?
O: I wish there were more options available for folks when they go to buy cider at restaurants, grocery stores, bars. I wish there were more wine and beer buyers who cared about cider. Some people go to the grocery store and say “I just went gluten-free for the first time, I guess it’s time to try a cider”, and I wish there were more options for them.
M: Do you ever work with apple growers or new cider makers to help them as they start their cider making journey?
O: Yes, I wouldn’t say directly, but there is an amazing community of the sharing of fruit in California. I’m thinking about Rosalind Reynolds of Emme and Ellen from Tilted Shed and how they share fruit and resources. I see so much of that happening, especially at this amazing intersection of wine and cider, which I’m so excited about. We carry a lot of co-ferments and blends between the two. Our friend Jake Mann owns Five Mile Orchard down near Santa Cruz, and how his family had traditionally grown mostly Newtown Pippins and how he has been top-working and grafting and trying to introduce different varieties of apples to be able to work specifically with cider makers. There’s a lot of intersection there.
M: I’m seeing a lot more of the ciders made with grape skins, co-ferments, that sort of thing. What’s exciting about that for you?
O: It’s a big thing right now in the Bay Area, and it’s so exciting for so many different reasons. Cider is best when it’s blended, and to be able to use some of the characteristics of grapes like higher sugar content, tannin, acidity, the same things you’re looking for in apples, to use those in combination can create some really beautiful wines/ciders. It’s not even just skins anymore—two or three summers ago, rosé cider was the thing. People were adding grape skins to cider to extract color and a little bit of flavor. Some of the bigger producers were adding beet juice to get that color. The most honest way to do a rosé cider was to use red-fleshed apples, like Redfield, to add that color. Pink Pearl is another great red-fleshed apple.
Cider is wine—wine is just fruit fermented into alcohol. The process of making it is pretty similar. You grind the apples instead of crushing, and then you bleed the juice and ferment it. That’s what makes cider, and what makes wine. For me, it’s been exciting to see so many winemakers start to experiment with apples because they’re bringing a lot of knowledge with them, and a lot of skill and talent into the cider industry. Seeing the things they’re making is really awesome, and it’s been a great way to talk about “what is wine” or “what is cider”? That’s a conversation we have a lot at Redfield.
Thinking about smoke taint and climate change, there were so many folks in California who had to throw away a lot of grapes these last couple of years. Apples are a lot less susceptible to smoke taint. Winegrowers are starting to talk about planting new varieties of grapes that might be better for hotter weather or might ripen faster, they’re also starting to think about alternative fruits to ferment, and apples are one of them.
M: You carry cider from all of the world at Redfield. What do you think is unique about the culture of cider and cidermaking in the United States?
O: The way that I’m excited about natural wine because there aren’t a lot of rules, there’s this open door of experimentation, and the expectation of what the final product needs to be is not the same as traditional old-school winemaking thought—that goes for cider as well. They’re actually really closely aligned in a lot of ways, and not just because natural winemakers are experimenting with cider, which I’m so excited to see. There’s this mentality of “no rules” in the same way. If you go to Spain, you’re going to meet a bunch of cider makers who have been making cider the same way for many hundreds of years. That just doesn’t exist here. There aren’t rules around exactly how you need to be doing things, the type of fruit you need to be using, and what the end product has to taste like. That’s really liberating in a lot of ways.
With that experimentation comes maybe some really gross stuff [laughs], but also some spectacular things that you may not have even thought of. Like, yeah I want a 100% quince cider! There are so many fun things to be able to do.
M: Where do you see the path of cider going in the United States?
O: I think climate change is something we need to be talking about because it’s going to affect all of the agricultural products that exist around the world. Cider is an agricultural product. One thing that I’ve found really interesting is the use of wild apples in cider making. This is something you see in the Northeast a lot, but you have access to and can find wild apples to be able to harvest and use for cider making. That exists a little bit in California, but not in the same way. I had the opportunity to spend some time with Steve Selin of South Hill Ciders in the Finger Lakes in New York and got to follow him around and see how he finds these wild apple trees and how he uses that fruit.
Cornell University is actually doing a lot of research on this, but using wild fruit, by the process of the trees even still being alive, they have longevity to them. There might be ways to think about fruit that is more disease intolerant or doesn’t succumb to pest pressure in the same way, or might even do better in hotter temperatures, vs working with these really old classic varieties of apples coming from the U.K. and France, bringing them to the U.S. and saying “this is what made good ciders over there, so this is what we’ll plant here”. People are planting Kingston Black in Sonoma County and saying “this isn’t working in the same way as a Wickson does”, which is a tree that was bred here in California. Those trees might not grow well if the planet continues to warm.
M: It seems like there’s this real connection between folks who are doubling down on hybrid varieties and folks who are working with wild apples or home-bred apples. As global warming continues, we’re going to find that our own varieties are the ones that are most suited to our area and to climate pressures.
O: I think it’s a mental shift of “I don’t need Kingston Black to make great cider”, and paying attention to what’s happening in your growing area. Are you trying to force a square peg into a round hole? Questioning that is going to be really important, and thinking about how the fruit is grown. Are you doing a lot of high-density planting on dwarf stock to maximize production per acre? That’s not going to work in California, because we don’t have that much water—you’d have to add a lot of water and nutrients to the soil. If you’re able to work with a more standard rootstock that can go deeper and have more access to water underground, you may not get fruit as fast, but the tree will last a lot longer. The more I see farmers thinking about that, that’s exciting to me, because in California that’s a reality that we have to think about every day.
[Olivia is talking about using dwarf stock for apple planting. Dwarf stock makes smaller trees which give fruit a lot faster, but they need a lot more nutrients, water, and maintenance. They also don’t live as long and need to be re-planted a lot sooner, becoming much more taxing on the environment than standard rootstock. Standard rootstock will burrow deeper into the ground to access water on their own, need less nutrient help, will live longer, but they take longer to give fruit.]
M: This has such a connection to growing vines. I’d love to start my own vineyard someday, and thinking about starting new vines, would I really want to start with vinifera? At least in New England, starting a brand new vineyard, to try and fit vinifera into our soil and changing climate, it’s starting to feel like it doesn’t make sense. It’s interesting to see that connection to cider making, and great to see consumers starting to respond to that, and move away from thinking that wild cider is weird or hybrid wines aren’t good.
O: A lot of that has to do with societal expectations of what is good. Like, “that’s not what they did in France in the 1800s”.
M: We’re not France! Ah, this grinds my gears!
O: Yes, exactly, and this focus on historically patriarchal, colonial, society and what they drank, I just don’t have time for this type of thinking anymore.
M: Absolutely. It’s wild to think about how much the consumer is influenced by the teaching curriculum of, say, the Court of Master Sommeliers, at the end of the day. When folks are taught in the Court, hey here’s 100 pages on France and 2 pages on America—it’s amazing to me how often I hear folks say “oh, I have an Old World palate”. We’re not taught to value our own products when it comes to beverage.
O: Somms are going to work with consumers and are teaching consumers what is good and what is bad, and that’s really the only way consumers are getting that knowledge. It’s a super narrow way of thinking about it.
M: What are you excited about right now?
O: Right now, it’s a really exciting time to be in cider. There’s something so exciting about the new-ness of cider—cider has been around for thousands of years, but there is a new-ness to it in the U.S. There’s something about having that new-ness that we can take advantage of. People can come into Redfield and not have expectations around what cider is and what it should be, so we can create this own world around how we’re talking about the beverage, and it’s an honor to be able to do that. It’s great, and there’s something so fun and exciting about that.
M: That’s really special. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. I can’t wait to make it over to your shop!
————
You can support Olivia and Redfield Cider by following them on Instagram and shopping with them here. Learn more about American cider by reading the book American Cider—I really enjoyed it.
Liked this interview? Hit subscribe and help me record more information about exciting winemakers, American history, and so much more. Paid subscriptions are just $5/month or $50/year, and 20% goes to St. Francis House. If you share this piece with a friend, it would mean a lot. Thanks for reading! You can follow me on Instagram here, and support my upcoming American wine business here.