The Fizz #18: Tess Bryant, wine importer & maker, is fermenting orchard specific cider on an island in Washington State.
In this issue, Tess Bryant and I talk about what it means to make a cider that is a snapshot of a time and place, and why up-and-coming importers should have something unique to say.
For the 18th issue of The Fizz, I spoke over Zoom with Tess Bryant, wine importer, wine maker at Piquenique Wines, and overall incredibly inspiring member of our industry. I was lucky to meet Tess a couple of years ago when she was introducing new wines to the Violette portfolio here in Boston. Her calm and welcoming energy immediately made me that much more connected to the wines she brought to the states. Today, Tess and her partner Nico live on an island in Washington State, making ciders that are unique to their region and focus on highlighting the orchards they work with, in a snapshot of time.
In this interview, we talk about what it means to be a wine importer with something to say, their move to the San Juan Islands, and how they’re approaching cider making in their new Pacific Northwest home.
Margot: You started your importing business in 2018. How did that come about?
Tess: I was working for a much larger import company based on the East Coast, and it became very clear that our values were not aligning. I had a safe cushy job with them, and that became increasingly unimportant as I realized that the wines I wanted to focus on, the way I wanted to do business, the way I wanted to live my life was not going to work there. I met this amazing community in Australia centered around the Adelaide Hills. Everyone was running businesses and making wine, but they were also living a good life and building community, growing gardens, raising families.
It was extremely inspiring to get to know them and be invited into that community, and to have a glimpse of what wholesome business relationships could look like. It’s still business, but your priorities aren’t necessarily growing all the time, or making more and more money—it’s more about caring for each other, caring for the planet, and drinking good wine. I try to really embrace those values when I think about the different business decisions I go through.
M: How do you choose the wines that you import?
T: The wines that I work with have to be made in a certain way—for me that means naturally—at least from organically farmed fruit, and made with preferably no additions at all. I have a very small wiggle room area of sometimes a couple of grams of sulfites added at bottling, but most of the producers I work with don’t add sulfites at all. I also decided that all of the wines that somebody makes needed to fall into that category—if someone just makes one token wine that happens to have those qualifiers, that’s not enough. I also need to want to spend time with that person—I’ve joked that I don’t want to work with assholes, and that’s kind of a simple way to put it, but it’s important to be able to spend time with someone, talk to them, be honest in our communication. I need to know that I can trust them and trust their business practices.
It’s extremely producer-focused, I need to make sure that I can have a really trusting relationship with the producer. Before COVID hit, I was going to Australia twice, sometimes three times a year. Now, I’ve started working with one new winery and one new brewer since all of this has happened—we’re talking on Zoom, on FaceTime, having other people in the wine business visit. It’s just cobbling together the best I can do without going to meet someone in person.
M: I’ve spoken to some folks who have been interested to start their own importing business. What would you say to folks who are moving in this direction? What are some of the joys and challenges?
T: Working for yourself is definitely a joy—I really love it. It’s not necessarily for everyone, but I do love it. Having full autonomy in terms of decision making and getting to travel—it’s not all romantic, but there are certainly romantic elements of getting to go on wonderful trips and meet wonderful people and drink great wines. That’s certainly a very real perk. I have also spoken to a lot of people who ask “how do I get that job?”. I have a hard time answering that because it’s not a job you apply for. You need either a lot of experience or a lot of money. I would like to think I had a lot of experience in the wine business as a whole—over ten years working in a variety of facets that allowed me to figure it out.
I try to encourage people to have something to say. There’s a lot of wine out there, and we don’t necessarily need to be spending all of our time moving it around in this insane way. You’re interested in opening a wine shop that focuses on the U.S., and we’re making ciders here, and selling a large part of our ciders here—in this county and in this state. It sounds weird, I’m an importer importing from one of the farthest away countries, but I move only a small amount and very specific type of wine around. There’s a million people running around France “finding the next carbonic Grolleau” or whatever it is. I love those wines, but whether we need more of them or not? A lot of them can stay in Europe. We don’t have to have access to every single little thing.
If someone wants to be an importer, I hope that if they pursue it, they have a vision of why. Not that the way I did it is the only way at all, but I knew that the natural wines from Australia were not represented here, and it felt like a huge void to me, and a great opportunity. I didn’t want to just add to the noise. I really hope that the wines I bring in are in their own category and are challenging and interesting and exciting for people.
M: That’s so insightful. I’d love to talk about your move—you recently moved to Washington to the San Juan Islands.
T: Yes! I’m on San Juan Island. It’s very remote and extremely beautiful. There were a lot of personal and professional elements to the move. My partner and I were both born and raised in California, we both love California, and we both reached points where we were ready for a change. Our family homes, and in his case, his family winery, were year after year threatened by wildfires. The real effect of climate change was, and remains, very scary. We visited here together for the first time in 2019 and there were these stories of all the apples around, sort of similar to New England. We didn’t hear any stories about natural wine or cider. We decided to take a risk and see what it would be like to ferment fruit outside of California, outside of very well known geographical areas.
We decided to move to Washington to work with apples. There are some really beautiful and historic homestead apple orchards that we have the privilege to work with, but also to see which grapes we could grow. There are some vineyards up here that are mostly commercially farmed, really classic varieties that aren’t necessarily suited to the climate. My partner, his background is in winemaking and viticulture, so the idea of moving to a cooler place further north with different everything and exploring what is actually suited to here, was and is really exciting.
We moved and quickly found that the grapes we were hoping in our fantasy world didn’t exist here yet, but they can! We’ve been able to track down quite a bit of budwood, we don’t have any land yet, but we’re talking to three local farms who are interested in collaborating with us. We’d plant and hopefully harvest some really beautiful grapes in a few years, and they’d have help caretaking the vineyards. Those grapes will be a mix of table grapes, hybrids, and unusual vinifera—there’s no Pinot Noir or Cabernet that we’re planting. They’ll also be mixed with apples, quince, and peaches even. There’ll be varieties that we hope will be suited to the climate.
M: That’s so exciting!
T: It’s really exciting. It’s hard to be patient because you get a vine in the ground, and you have to wait a few years, but in the meantime we do have these amazing 150-year old apple orchards we’re working with.
M: Where do you find those orchards, and what kind of fruit are you working with?
T: The island chain we’re in actually continues up into Canada, so once you cross the border, there are even more orchards. The story seems to go that during prohibition, many of the historic orchards on our side of the border were cut down. A huge apple industry that started in the late 1800s was decimated. That combined with trains being built on the mainland moved fruit commerce off of these islands and to Eastern Washington. Some trees that remain are often untended, but most of the original orchards are gone.
There’s an orchard across the street from our house we’ve been watching since we moved here. We’ve been seeing branches fall off because it hasn’t been pruned properly—when there’s tons of fruit, the apples are so heavy that they can weigh the branches down until they fall. We’ve been talking to the person who owns that property to help maintain it. There are many untended orchards, and there’s the opportunity to use that genetic material to plant new orchards. There’s some people on Lopez, a neighboring island, who have spearheaded research that collaborates with the university here to find, identify, caretake—although many of the old trees are past caretaking at this point because they’ve been so neglected—and harvest budwood to plant new orchards from those old varieties.
There are a lot of forgotten varieties here that could be identified by a professional, I’m sure. There’s a lot of the King apple, a dual purpose apple that can be used for both eating and cider making. There aren’t that many strictly cider varieties. Most of what we’ve found seems to be dual-purpose. Looking for particular varieties hasn’t been our main concern. Finding fruit and trees and making sure that no one has been spraying Roundup or anything under the trees, is what we’ve been focusing on. There’s a lot of translucent apples here that are used as pollinators. They aren’t as interesting to eat or make cider out of, but the fruits are still wonderful and we don’t want them to go to waste. We have been using them as a base for mead and co-fermentation experiments.
M: If a lot of these apples are unknown, how do you find the right balance of what you’re looking for in a cider?
T: This will be our second vintage—it’s still unknown. What we decided to do was orchard specific fermentation. We pick anything that someone might have planted in that orchard, and we do our best to use those choices to see what happens from the fermentation. Certainly, some of them have been simpler, and with those we’ve decided to add some other fruits to them to make them more complex. Generally with the older trees, we’ve found that the orchards sort of create their own identity after 100 years of growing together. We’ve been really happy with just relying on the fruit that ripens together going well together.
M: With wine, I understand how you could create a wine with the acidity that you like—pick earlier/later, etc. Is that a similar experience with apples?
T: It’s interesting because as soon as the apples started to ripen in August, I was excited about making a super tart and acidic cider. We did make quite a bit of cider in the beginning there, but as we were tasting and the season progressed, it became clear that a lot of the more interesting fruit ripened later. That doesn’t mean it’s sweeter—we’re still fermenting to dry or nearly dry with pét-nat. The flavors did become more complex, and the longer the fruit was on the tree, the more interesting the flavor was. It did lend itself to a similar idea in winemaking, which was a learning curve for us, because we both made small amounts of cider in the past. We hadn’t had the opportunity to return to an orchard throughout the season and watch different varieties ripen differently. I don’t think we’ll do a lot differently this year because it was so exciting to watch that window of flavor and ripeness shift over the season.
One of the things we decided to do was work with a farm called Blue Moon on an island called Waldron and we did four cuvées from them. They’re just called Blue Moon 1, 2, 3, 4. Everything that was picked in the beginning of September went into Blue Moon 1, and et cetera. We thought about blending them together, but it seemed exciting to capture those windows. The varieties are all mixed together—it’s just what was ripe at that time.
M: That’s so cool. Do you notice terroir in the ciders—is there a land specific flavor that comes out?
T: Yes. For the Blue Moon ciders, we encountered this farm because they come to our farmers market and bring vegetables. Their vegetables were insanely delicious. I didn’t know broccoli could taste like that. It was beautiful. We heard they had apples and hoped that translated to the apples. We worked with the King apple from different places, but the apples on Waldron taste different. Waldron is a small island next to Canada facing the Salish Sea. It’s an extremely special place we have only just begun to explore. We didn’t sit down together and say “we have to feature terroir!” because it was just inherent to our pursuit from the beginning—fermenting a snapshot of an orchard in a window of time, and showcasing not just a variety, but a place.
Learning about the historic farming culture here has been really important to us, and we hope we will have our own farm and acreage in the future. We are trying to be creative with our options in the meantime.
M: What grapes do you think you’ll be working with?
T: Last year we were able to work with around 30 different varieties. There was an experimental vineyard planted 40 years ago on the mainland by someone who had become a friend of ours. They allowed us to pick all of that fruit last year, which was extremely exciting. To see what the vines produced after being planted decades ago was invaluable. We don’t know exactly what we’re planting, but we’re definitely planting table grapes and hybrids to make wine out of, and we’re planting vinifera eventually—maybe next year or the following year.
M: That’s awesome. Hybrids are so exciting.
T: They really are! There are so many ways to make delicious wines from hybrids. I think it’s super short-sighted to think you can only have “good” wines produced from classic vinifera. Drinking natural wines has taught so many people to be excited about new and unusual flavors. People keep asking me what wine I’m excited about in California, and I don’t know! I’m more excited about what’s going on in Maine or Vermont or Texas. It’s so interesting to watch these geographical challenges be met.
M: We have that local history with hybrid grapes too, and that’s really special. Thanks so much for your time, and I can’t wait to see what you all make coming up!
—————
Non-profit pairing: Tess supports Industry Sessions, a “natural wine study empowering BIPOC wine professionals across the U.S. & Canada”. You can support this important organization by donating through Venmo.
Wine News: On Sunday, May 16th, I’ll be joined by Oregon winemaker Brianne Day for a virtual wine class. We’ll talk through the wines she makes, how she made lemonade out of lemons during the wildfire season, & all the ways she supports her local winemaker community. Sign up here—20% of proceeds go to St. Francis House.
You can support Tess Bryant by buying the wines she imports! You can check out the producers she works with here. Follow her on Instagram to stay tuned around upcoming cider and wine releases.