The Fizz #32: Patrick and Danielle of Patois Cider are caring for Virginia's deep history with apples
I spoke to Patrick and Danielle of Virginia's Patois Cider about the state's apple history, how they work with old orchards, planting trees, & the perils apples face in Virginia.
For the 32nd issue of The Fizz, I spoke with Patrick and Danielle of Virginia’s Patois Cider. Virginia has a deep history with apple growing. Colonists brought apple and pear seedlings with them from Europe and planted them with the intention of making cider, which was safe to drink. In the 1600s, you might have even paid your rent with bushels of apples. Homesteads all over Virginia had apples growing in order to supplement a family’s food supply and produce drinking cider.
Today, Patrick and Danielle are tapping into that history to create ciders that speak of their surroundings, their state’s history of DIY fermentation, and their connection to the beverage. They source wild apples, find old historical orchards, and work with growers in their community to produce Virginia ciders. There’s a history and culture of apple growing here that is worth uncovering, and I’m excited for these two passionate makers bringing it forward to American cider culture.
In this issue, we talk about the history of Virginia apple growing, how Patois gets the apples, pears, and grapes that they work with, and the struggles that Virginia apples and their stewards face in today’s environment and political climate. Find Patois on Instagram here.
Margot: Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get into winemaking?
Danielle: So Patrick has been fermenting for years now.
Patrick: Yeah, I went to school in Boston and was a restaurant industry person, as was Danielle. We didn't know each other, unfortunately, at that point in time. But, I was convinced that I couldn't afford wine. Home brewing beer seemed very silly to me—getting grain from the Midwest and hops from the Pacific Northwest, when there's a bunch of old Baldwin apples, you know, a stone's throw from Boston.
I just started with some carboys. Hobby brewing cider made sense because it was made from stuff that was around. In restaurants, I was being exposed to more and more wine and getting really hooked by that, in particular natural wine. I worked at a regional cidery for three years and change. It was kind of like fermentation bootcamp.
Danielle: We met at said regional cidery and it was moving in the direction of fermenting your apples year round—storing them in cold storage, and just doing non-stop fermentation.
Patrick: I learned a whole lot because of that ability to ferment so frequently, like eight months out of the year. I was able to collapse what would have been 10 years of winemaking experience into three years.
Margot: What happened after you left that cidery?
Patrick: I had done some trials fermenting. If you go and speak to anyone with any respect in the industry—wine or cider in Virginia—and say, “I'm really interested in working with apples. I want to grow baseline organically, but I'm super suspicious of copper.” Everyone immediately just says you're a fool. I thought maybe I’d to go to Oregon or something. Maybe I can knock on Nate Reddy's door, you know? [Nate Reddy is the winemaker at Hiyu Wine Farm, and is known in the wine community for his eco-friendly approach to farming.]
But going up in the mountains and then going to the orchard—there’s something there. There are gnarled trees, but they've set fruit. No-one's done anything to them. Making trials with those and then tasting them—you realize that it is possible here. The trials were in 2017, 2018, and then the first vintage was 2019.
Danielle: Patrick just dove head first into building this little cellar and a shared warehouse. We've got a carpenter and a leather maker and artist, and we're kind of like working out of the seams in our little quadrant where we're making cider. It’s a very garagiste style bootstrap. 2019 was a gift for the first vintage because there was a drought and all of those wild seedling apples that we had been exploring were laden with fruit.
Patrick: We were finally able to be present for it and we essentially would throw Artie and some sandwiches in the truck and go bombing around the backwoods. Going up into the mountain where disease pressures are a little bit lower and pest pressures are a little bit lower. A big issue for Virginia is cedar apple rust and quince apple rust. It's a bacteria that jumps back and forth between apple trees and Virginia Junipers. Those trees are everywhere but they only grow at a certain elevation line.
When you go up above that elevation road, you can find the remnants of a homestead from a couple hundred years ago, and guess what? There are three to five apple trees that are full of fruit.
Margot: What made you want to come down to Virginia from Boston?
Patrick: I grew up in DC. It was kind of a coming home of sorts. I always liked running around the woods of Virginia, but it was an opportunity to get a job working with cider. I didn't really have any grand plans at that point, but I had been learning more and more about the history of apples in this part of the country. I’d be going through historical records and there's these farmers debating pre-industrial agriculture and mentioning all of these old farms in Virginia. Well, where the hell are those places? Going to where these places used to be—you have a pretty good chance that there are still the remnants of a commercial orchard—there's still at least some descendants from them around there.
We’ve been trying to get more exposed to the history of apples up and along the Blue Ridge in Virginia. For almost a hundred years between the 19th and early 20th centuries—that was the economy, and that was the culture. You used to be able to cut down someone's Virginia Juniper because it was such a threat to the apple trees, which were so valued and so important. The more that you learn about that, the more you're like, well, there's something here. There's something tangible to the area. It's been forgotten for a couple of generations, maybe we have to try again.
Margot: What does that history of apples and cider making in Virginia look like?
Patrick: There's a two-prong history to it. There's the one we've been touching on, which is the commercial history. There are still some “abandoned orchards”, where there is no longer the ability to support a fresh eating orchard anymore. You either see stuff that has been phased out, which has current plantings that still have fruit, but no one's taken care of them. There are some releases of cider we have that are like that. Like the Bent Mountain cider that we do is from 80 year old trees that were planted after somebody got a GI bill.
The current generation can't take care of them anymore, which is good for us because they're not sprayed. The Witt Orchard on Bent Mountain—that whole place was renowned for apples from after the Civil War until essentially the 1980s. Albemarle Pippins from Bent Mountain were exported out of the country—there had to have been something about them that was particularly flavorful. Bent Mountain has a 150 to almost 200 year history of producing Albemarle Pippins.
Danielle: Isn’t it like Thomas Jefferson's favorite apple?
Patrick: Yeah. For anything to have any sort of historical worth around here, it has to be Jefferson approved. There is still a lot of cult worship in Charlottesville and Albemarle County around Jefferson.
[An aside: Many of the large orchards that folks look up to today were made possible by the labor of enslaved people. The Jeffersons, Fitzhughs, and Washingtons of the state had orchards that were worked by slave labor. There are many voices in Virginia’s orchard history that we do not hear today.
“Enslaved black men, women, and children were the ones growing the crops and making cider, beer, and wine on the plantations owned by many of the Founding Fathers. Many of those slaves brought fermentation techniques and styles with them from their respective countries in Africa.” Read this post on Malus Zine here.]
The homestead orchards—it's not going to be a planting of several acres of one apple. It's going to be a handful of seeds or a handful of root cutting that just go in the ground. Those people would improvise and say well, this is a good drying apple. This apple's good for eating and this apple is good for baking and that apple is good for cider. The homestead history has way more of this genetic chance thrown into it, which is ultimately more interesting from our current vantage point. It’s about embracing the apples’ genetic variability as a means of heading off climate change. The climate is so different now and will continue to be even more inhospitable to those old varietals.
We’re both committed to the idea that growing is not just explicitly extracting. We've planted about 250 trees up in the mountains at various elevation points, and a good cluster at this old Western Albemarle former commercial orchard. They’re seedlings—some from the forestry department here in Virginia, some from seed. We’re embracing that genetic variability not as a liability—which is how it's been viewed by the commercial market. A row of trees that bloom and ripen at different times does not make sense if you're trying to do an “organized planting”, but stumbling on some of these mountain meadows, where the understory is not tilled or mowed, there are wild flowers and tap rooted plants—it’s beautiful. There just so happens to also be ten to fifteen 40 foot tall trees. We do a mix of gathering fruit that is wild, trees that we’re planting, and old commercial orchards that we’re gathering from.
Margot: You’re gathering wild fruit, working with people who own land with old trees, as well as sourcing fruit from other growers? That's a lot of different places to get fruit. How do you actually find these places—old commercial orchards or homesteads? Do you just drive around and you're like, oh wow that's an apple tree?
Patrick: There is an element of that, yeah.
Danielle: In the spring time, it's usually either apple or dogwood with the white flowers. They stick out—they're earlier blooming. They're not quite as early as the cherries, but they're earlier than most other trees.
Patrick: You can just kind of go bumming around, but it’s also important to know the constraints of where in the environment will an unsprayed apple tree survive. Looking at historical documents—where were the old plantings? You know, the Shenandoah National Park, which is essentially up and along the Blue Ridge—those were all old homesteads that the government just seized.
Danielle: You can look at a map and see “Old Orchard Drive” or “Pippin Way”.
Patrick: It's not like out west where they truly were undisturbed land that were turned into parks. These were old homesteads where people lived in the mountains. The places that used to be old homesteads are now these palatial estates that very wealthy people own. That's the majority of the people that we deal with now.
Danielle: We ask them permission—we either knock on the door or write a letter. I love the connections that Patrick has been able to make. He was on the phone the other day with like a woman who he wrote a note to about an apple tree and she was around 80 something years old telling us about the donkey that loves to eat the apples. Some people are say oh, you don't want these crabapples. We do, and we give them some cider when we’re done. These one-on-one connections are meaningful.
Patrick: Danielle has been helping me a lot with moving away from this ethos of having an estate cidery and having full control over every aspect. We’re trying to be aware of these potential connections that are all around us and make it much more of a web of people who we work with. Then we get these stories about their personal history with their trees. It's fantastic.
Margot: What made you decide to do plant those 250 trees?
Patrick: Pay it forward. Experimentation. It takes a real long time for a seedling tree to reach a point of maturity where it's bearing fruit. As soon as you can get them in the ground and then make ends meet in the meantime.
Margot: Where are you planting these?
Patrick: Zero land that we lease or own.
Margot: Is this private land where you've asked people to let you plant, or is this like, we're just gonna plant some trees here?
Danielle: There've been a couple of those extra trees that we've just planted and a couple, you know, guerrilla grafting. This orchard down the street from us, the Wayland Orchard—most of those trees are from the eighties. There are a few that are probably from the forties. Some of them were on their way out. Planting new trees is kind of like raising a puppy into a big old wonderful dog.
Patrick: A lot of these trees had disease in them. Some of them are hollowed out. It's been very discouraging, to be honest, trying to bring them back with zero synthetic inputs—not even sulfur. We’re having to learn how to grow apples for health and not yield. This line of knowledge about how to grow fruit as part of a homestead model is gone. I don't know a resource to reach out to. Our strategies are somewhat driven by the fact that we don't know what we're doing, but we want to adhere to some sort of value set.
This is the fourth growing season that I've been working at the Wayland Orchard, and every year the foliage health is better and it sets more fruit. It's very slowly seeming to be working in a positive direction, but every year there is also something sort of catastrophic. This year it was quince apple rust that dropped about a third of the fruit.
Margot: That’s tough. How do you find terroir as a concept in apples?
Patrick: The short answer is that it's too early to draw any sort of conclusion to be quite honest. This year, because there's a decent fruit set, we're going to try to do a limestone bedrock and a granite bedrock cider—separate bottlings. Each bottle will still be a blend of what we can cobble together from those bedrocks. It would be very difficult to do some sort of Burgundian variable isolation, but that's not what cider is anyway. I will say that having worked with the same orchard in two very different weather years in 2019 and 2020, there was something about both the aromatics and the texture of the sites that were constant to me. I'm very excited about a decade from now when we can do a vertical tasting.
However much you want to be removed from the posturing of terroir, there's still the intangible of something that is grown somewhere is going to taste different than something that is growing somewhere else.
Margot: Why does terroir feel like posturing to you?
Patrick: It’s so wrapped up in hierarchy. People who own land like to point at it to justify their own possessions. I go back and forth with terroir.
Margot: I believe in terroir very much. I understand where you're coming from in the sense that it has become attached to this way of creating hierarchy in wine. Someone says, oh, well, my grapes are from Romanée-Conti. That doesn't mean that my grapes from Vermont or wherever are any worse than yours, but I think that is actually a product of this AOC model—here's a region that is grande or premiere, vs. here’s an unnamed region.
I think the actual concept of terroir as a sense of place, like the soil and the air and the climate, and the variety that grows there creates this little snapshot in time.
Patrick: For sure. We struggle with how to present the ciders in a way that is not tripping over ourselves, trying to prove that they are worthy of attention through either price point or how they are presented. My favorite thing in the world is watching someone who is not part of the wine world taste our cider and have some sort of spark of realization that terroir is not exotic or “other”. It’s all around you. That's why we’re working with apples.
Margot: I love that. Why are you choosing to co-ferment grapes and apples?
Patrick: Fruit chemistry, mostly. A good acidic apple in Virginia in a warmer climate, even at elevation, is going to have a pH of 3.3 to 3.5 at press, which means because malic acid is our only acid, and because we're not going to fine or filter, it's going to go through malolactic fermentation. By the time it's in the bottle and it's finished and ready for release, we’re looking at a pH of 3.8 to 3.9. Grapes have tartaric acid and they're finishing 3.4 to 3.5—it seems like a very small amount, but it makes a difference.
Margot: You're using grapes to supplement your acidity, essentially?
Patrick: Yeah, we're essentially naturally acidifying with a different fruit that has better chemistry.
Margot: Where do you get the grapes that you work with?
Patrick: We’re very much swimming in the wake of some winemaker friends, particularly Ben Jordan, who is the winemaker at Virginia’s Early Mountain Vineyards. He helps us source fruit. [Read The Fizz with Lee Campbell, evangelist for Early Mountain Vineyards here.] We’ve liked working with hybrids—you’re essentially banking on them not having been sprayed since hybrids generally don’t require as much spraying. They’re also a lot more affordable. A ton of vitis vinifera grapes in Virginia can go for $3,000.
Margot: What?! $3,000? That’s a bananas price!
Patrick: It's this vicious cycle of land values being very high so that a bottle of table wine that you get at a vineyard in Virginia is still going to be about 30 to $40. If you start a winery, unless you're wealthy, you have to start charging that amount in order to pay off the mountain of debt you’re walking into. Most people are not growing their own either, and all of these wineries have been popping up. So now there's this mad dash for growers—more demand and less supply. Meanwhile, Danielle and I are just going to drive up in the mountains and write a handwritten note and get some apples.
Margot: That's extremely interesting. As you grow your business and as some of these older trees start becoming unproductive, what happens as you scale and as you start to make more cider?
Danielle: We're figuring that out. We’re doing what feels right.
Patrick: We’re trying to stay observant. Virginia’s climate is so variant. You can’t be a single estate producer in Virginia. In 2018, we got double the amount of rain we're supposed to get. In 2019 there was a flash drought. In 2020, there were multiple late frosts that wiped out everything. In 2021—it's been dry all summer and now we have a sequence of tropical storms that are just going to come up and dilute all the fruit. There's no such thing as being able to make a living off of one site, you have to have a very wide net.
To do that, we’re focusing on handshake community building, where someone introduces us to someone else who knows where some apples are. Maybe someone’s uncle owned some land and it had some trees on it and it might be amenable to us planting on it. Right now, honestly, I'm just personally dealing with anxiety and self doubt over the thought of—are we going to be able to do all of the ridiculous amount of work that is required for all of these things to come to fruition, to the point where we can live off of this and not break our backs? How are we going to be honest with ourselves about what we are capable of doing? That’s a big question right now.
Danielle: I think that is the good thing about apples, is that they don't need to be babied.
Patrick: Yes, you have to be a little bit more patient, but an own rooted tree that we've taken care of for the five to ten years that it takes to establish itself does not need us around. But there's also the genetic variability dice toss, where some of these trees are going to have a susceptibility to a disease that is going to have to be grafted over and we're gonna have to wait five years to find out.
On Bent Mountain, the Mountain Valley Pipeline is coming through, and they bulldozed one-hundred-year-old-plus apple trees on this person's property. It's a very contentious thing for mountain area Virginia. That person’s name is “Red” Terry and she and her family fought the pipeline project. Appalachians Against Pipelines is an organization that collects bail funds for protestors and supports the cause to halt these pipelines.
Margot: It sounds like these apples have been battered from all sides—climate change, disease, pipelines and land seizures. Is there anything that could help you as you go through this journey?
Patrick: I’d love to explore grant programs for land restoration, or find state or non-profit money that we can pay other people to help with the hard work that is required of going up in the mountains and taking care of these trees. Maybe that would provide an entry point to people who wouldn’t otherwise have had opportunities to do that work. I don’t know, that’s a tough question.
Danielle: Definitely. This project is a way for us to find a way to connect to something that feels deeper and purposeful, and not just a business. Part of that means not having all the answers and continually learning and making the choices that feel right.
—————
You can support Danielle and Patrick by buying their cider when they have new releases. Follow them on Instagram to stay in touch with their projects and send them a note of support. Please donate to Appalachians Against Pipelines to help support the folks fighting against this destructive pipeline project.
Liked this interview? Hit subscribe below and help me record more information about exciting winemakers, American history, and help me pay my interviewees who aren’t making wine for their own label. Paid subscriptions are just $5/month or $50/year, and 15% also 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.