The Fizz #73: Erik Longabardi and Benford Lepley of Floral Terranes are betting big on Long Island
The team behind Long Island's Floral Terranes is in it for the mission of local apple conservation. Making good ciders and wines will help them get there.
It’s been a while since the last issue of The Fizz, but almost two thousand of you all are still here with me. I want to say thank you for allowing me to take this break, and for sticking with me now that interviews are back—I appreciate it so much.
For this issue of The Fizz, I spoke with Erik Longabardi and Benford Lepley, the two makers behind Long Island’s Floral Terranes, a cidery/winery focused on land and fruit conservation. You could say Erik and Benford are conservation-first, fermentation-second—they’re focused on making a positive impact in their home state.
In this issue, we speak in depth around the loss of plant material Long Island is experiencing, and the history it has the opportunity to preserve. We speak about their nursery and how they work with apple conservationists around the United States. We also touch on the difficulties of running a cider-based business out on Long Island, and how they use grapes to move their mission forward. I’m excited about the work Erik and Benford are doing, and encourage you to seek out their products to experience Long Island fruit for yourself.
Margot: How did you get into this? Why did you decide to start fermenting on Long Island?
Erik: Longabardi: I grew up here on Long Island. I left when I was 18 and went to college upstate at SUNY Purchase. I moved back to Long Island after living in Brooklyn for a while with my girlfriend at the time. We bought a house. When I moved out here, I didn't know anyone anymore. I didn't have any community.
I was very interested in cooking and making food and experimenting in my apartment in Williamsburg. I would drink colostrum milk and make ginger beer and ferment a lot of different things and sometimes they were great and sometimes they were bad. When I moved back to Long Island, I had a big house and I had a space to do things in. I got really interested in local history and community. So I built a farmer's market in my town and started partaking in a lot of local organizations like the Long Island Botanical Society. We just started started working with what was around us at the time. It grew from there.
Benford Lepley: I had worked on various small vegetable farm type agricultures while I was in school. Then I started working with this farm incubator program with some friends of mine who grew up in northern Alabama. When I graduated, I went down to northern Alabama with them and was exposed to various types of fermentation through Sandor Katz zine-style books a book called Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers.
I met this guy that had some extremely serious health problems. His muscles and connective tissue was deteriorating and he said that he had gotten this book about healing beers and was brewing these medicinal beers to help nourish himself and I said, oh that sounds cool! That coincided with my expanding interest in learning more about ecology. In the South, especially Northern Alabama, it's culturally rich and ecologically very rich. There's so much herbal material and fruit material and nuts growing there. There's food on the ground most times of the year. It's kind of amazing.
Actually, I grew up on Long Island and I feel like it’s really similar. I'm from here, and I've lived in various different places, but I have this sort of life infrastructure. My life's infrastructure is here, and it happens to be a really good place to do all sorts of things relating to the natural world.
Margot: Long Island has a really interesting and rich agricultural history, right? It used to be New York City's breadbasket—where all these farms were supplying the city with food. There seems to still be a big agricultural aspect to Long Island. Does that history inspire you at all?
Erik: A hundred percent. We are trying to uncover the history, the present, and the future of what is going to happen here.
Benford: One of the really interesting things about Long Island is that the agricultural community and history here runs very deep. Some of the earliest big nurseries in the U.S. were based in this area. Historically there's been potatoes and dairy and fruit and all sorts of stuff grown here. My friend Eliza Greenman, who's based out of Virginia, she works with the Savannah Institute as a tree crops breeder. In some old text, she read about black locust trees that had been grown on Long Island that were being grown to make ship masts. They’re highly rot resistant and strong wood that would grow straight up. That's such a niche thing. Apparently it exists on Long Island.
On the other end of that, we're in peak land development here. I have spent some time talking with apple people from places like Maine—there are trees there that used to be here on Long Island are, but the remnants of them are just tiny and in places like Maine, that plant material is more intact.
What’s happening now on Long Island is representative of what could happen to the rest of the country—our history is just literally slipping away. I was just out on the North Fork of Long Island, which is really the last actually agricultural area here. I've been following some trees since 2013 or 2014—there are probably ten great trees out there that I found, and I just was out there this past weekend and almost every single one of them has gone. I was taken aback by it. Several of the remaining trees had just disappeared in the last few months.
Through our combined efforts to locate and work with various different sites that still have trees, we have been able to take cuttings and propagate them. I have a nursery with several hundred trees. A good chunk of them are from Long Island. Some of them are definitely old heirloom trees that could be identified genetically or just through somebody who really knows how to identify fruit by their characteristics. Some of them are seedlings. A decent amount of them are crab apples.
Part of that nursery is us sharing scions and receiving scions from people all across the U. S. who are doing similar stuff. It's kind of like a small node and a network of a bunch of people that are doing this stuff with the intention both of preservation, but also of looking toward the future. What does this work mean for the ciders of 2050 or just the snacking apples of 2050?
Margot: As the land on Long Island gets developed and you lose some of those trees, is the nursery part of other efforts you're taking to preserve that history long-term?
Benford: Part of it is sending scions to people so the trees are growing elsewhere. One of the goals with the nursery is to plant trees that we can watch after. One of the goals is to sell trees to local people who want fruit trees.Another goal is to just have a bank of material to share with people.
You know, I'm not convinced that any of those actually do a good job of preserving things. Because none of that stuff is permanent, and it's really hard to trace. We have yet to figure out, and it's going to have to be bigger than us, ways to actually work on the preservation of that material. It is probably going to have to involve things like land trusts. My friend Eliza had a brilliant suggestion of making graveyards or cemeteries fruit preservation orchards because you can't develop them.
Margot: Oh wow, that’s a cool idea.
Benford: Yeah. I really liked this idea. Another part of it is making ciders as best as we can to represent one element of the value of those spaces. The ciders we make, maybe their main intention is to shine a spotlight on what these places and apples are.
Margot: I love that. How are you sourcing your fruit today? Is it door to door through the relationships you’ve built? Are you still foraging a lot?
Erik: We do a lot of legwork and knocking on people's doors still. Benford will talk a little bit about using Google Earth and me using real estate ads. There are a lot of inventive ways we've figured out how to amass fruit.
Benford: At least for this year, we have very little time to go do things like door to door searching. At least for 2023, we have a need to be a bit more pragmatic. Several sites that we work with are ones where we know there's a decent crop and we have a good relationship with the property owners. We have worked with the these sites for like several years and it’s a good relationship. If you are too focused on the door to door method to obtain apples, you can stretch yourself thing. The amount of time and effort it takes is really high.
All the door knocking I've done this year has been to talk to people about their trees. I recently learned that the neighborhood I live in used to be an orchard about 100 years ago. I noticed these in a neighbor’s yard—35 to 40 feet tall, taller than a three story house and all planted in a row. I’d never seen any fruit on those trees. An arborist mentioned to me that they were crab apples, but bigger, and they’re really delicious. I finally mustered the courage to go knock on their door, and they would only talk to me through the intercom. They didn't believe me that I worked with fruit, so I printed out a copy of the article that was written about us in the Times, and wrote them a note that I just wanted to talk about their tree.
They said the tree wasn’t in good shape and they were going to cut it down. I said well, maybe I could take a look at it before you do that, just to gather some information. They wouldn't even let me do that. I did leave them with my phone number, and said I would just want to take one stick the diameter of a pencil, just to make sure that I could graft it into my nursery. They called me three days later and said we left you some sticks and they had wrapped a bunch of these prunings together. Out of maybe 25 sticks they left me, there was one stick that was viable. I actually have it in my fridge and I need to go graft it.
Anyway, the realities of my increasing financial responsibility and financial difficulty of living on Long Island, I want to focus our efforts for getting fruit on the places we know that fruit is available and that are great sites to work with. The door to door thing is really valuable as a learning exercise and an exercise in conservation work. I just think this was a perfect example—now that tree is gone, they did cut it down several weeks late. I've got to graph that tree and hopefully something takes.
Margot: That's crushing about the tree. That would break my heart.
Benford: It's sad. I mean, it's all fleeting. Everything disappears. It’s crazy.
Margot: Why do you think people are cutting their trees down? For land development?
Benford: I see it for highway departments. Sometimes if the tree is on a roadside, maybe it's attracting rodents and maybe it could cause an accident if there's an animal. Just this weekend out on the North Fork, it was because somebody bought the lot that a tree was growing on and there's a house being constructed. One row of trees out on the North Fork got cut down and in its place was a big irrigation tube for a sod farm. This is all just stuff in the last few weeks. The people around the block from me, it was that their tree wasn't healthy, but I think it was just poorly shaped and pruned. Maybe the leaves had issues, and maybe it would have benefited from being sprayed with Cueva two times a year.
I want to impress on people that it shouldn't just be our earnest desire to go take care of things for people, just out the goodness of our hearts. I really want and have an expectation that people should value this plant material as well, use their resources to take care of it.
Margot: Definitely. Erik, is there a lot of competition around you? Other folks who are trying to find apple trees using things like Google Earth? Is that difficult?
Erik: You have to understand that Long Island is not like upstate New York where there are apple trees in every community. Apple trees here exist in wealthy people's backyards, and we don't have access to that. We’ve worked really hard to find the trees that we’ve found.
We had to start out by looking at old historical documents, where are these trees coming from? Are they still there? Where are these estates? Cause for Long Island, where we live on the North Shore of Long Island, they were all really wealthy estates and people had gardens where they would be shipped over rare specimens of trees from England or other places in the world by boat in the twenties and thirties. They planted them here—they had the money to do that. I think everyone should have access to trees.
Benford: There’s a really finite amount of resources here. Some of the sites we work with could be classified as small orchards, and then there's some where it’s really just one off trees. I think it's understandable that we feel protective over some of the places that we've worked with and that we rely on the fruit to be able to continue our project, which is like also tied to the desire to conserve and further share this stuff. I don't want to fight over scraps and I want Long Island and the whole East Coast altogether, to have more access.
Part of the idea of the nursery is sharing material with people from the West Coast and Virginia and Maine. We need more orchards and there need to be more trees in people's yards.
Margot: You're also using grapes. I've had your Cabernet Franc, which I loved, and you’ve used Chardonnay, Merlot. Why work with grapes at all? Why is that important to you?
Erik: When I first started the project, I really wanted to make wine. Wine was what I cared about at first. I had some contacts with vineyard managers out on the east end, but in 2017, I became more intent on making cider because I thought I had more access to apples actually than to grapes. From a business perspective, I knew that there might be a year where we wouldn’t have access to apples. How do you support a business here that just does one thing?
I’ve really only started to think of it as a business thing this year. It’s always been about—what do we like? We never thought, oh we’ll release this thing because it’s going to sell. It hasn’t been about selling. We’re just thinking about what we have around us. What can we make from it? If it’s good, we’ll release it. If it’s not good, we won’t. Having access to grapes over the years and developing our relationships with people on the eastern end of Long Island who've been really supportive of our mission and been really excited about the ciders that we make like—I think that's part of the evolution of Floral Terranes.
It’s never been about how much money we can make. But frankly, we don’t even really have a space to produce in right now. We need to figure out how we can survive and make the best quality ciders and wines we can at the scale that we can. We both work full time jobs, and we’re trying to figure out how can do honest production without selling things that we don't believe in. That's never going to be the case for us because I’d rather fold.
Benford: We do buy some apples, but our goal with a lot of the Floral Terranes ciders are is kind of anti growth. It's not really scalable. I both love it and I also think it makes it really hard to continue on. I see winemaking, especially on Long Island where we have access to grapes, as fundamentally important to the conservation work of the apples. I want to get better at making delicious wines to continue doing the apple stuff. Honestly, I see it as a means to an end.
I could see a world where I would actually not even want to make wine. I would just prefer to make really cool ciders. I really am more familiar with and enjoy the way that trees grow and integrate and take care of themselves over the years. I can only see Floral Terranes existing if we treat it like a business, and we have to use grapes to do that because the apples aren't there. There's nothing wrong with that—we'll continue to make wines and learn how to do it better and grow our relationships with farmers and vineyard managers out here that are doing the labor.
Erik: It’s pretty easy for us to make a good wine here, but it's so hard to make a great cider on Long Island. The genetics of grapes here, depending on the clone and where it's grown, it's pretty textbook—you don't need to work really hard to make a great wine, but to make a great cider, man, that's fucking hard.
Benford: Sometimes I do think about that. These grapes have been bred and selected for thousands of years to make good wine. I don't know if we've gotten there yet and I actually have a huge amount of confidence in the found fruit that we work with. I consistently feel like those ciders really do express the fruit, and we’ve been good stewards of the fruit. I’ve been more happy with our ciders than our wines, but I think that it's been the wines that have been easier for us to arrive at because of the whole infrastructure that's already built around them.
I appreciate that infrastructure, but you know, we've also had several wines we've had to hold back. I don’t know if it’s because of something that got sprayed on the grapes and because of then how we worked with them in turn? Grapes are expensive here, and sometimes I'm just like man, this is a bit of a shit show, and I find it really hard. I do want to do more of it—we need good grapes to continue on.
Erik: But we also need to continue to make really good ciders and good wines. It's not just about making a great cider and making an okay wine. We know how hard it is in the marketplace right now to gain someone's trust and attention. We've made that mistake. We've put out some things that weren't great being young people in this game, but now in our seventh vintage, that's not gonna fly.
Benford: It definitely puts us in a vulnerable position. We had this discussion of hey, maybe we have to rent a warehouse and what does that look like and a friend of mine said you should look into insurance, see if you could insure a wine in case it gets ruined—which we've never had a wine become ruined, but the stakes at this point are high. Oh well, the wine got ruined and we can't pay the rent so we’ve got to shut down Floral Terranes. We really want to avoid that.
Erik: This is hard stuff to do. When we first started this all my money from my job went into Floral Terranes. Buying secondhand stuff and the best corks and the best bottles, even though that was a huge financial reach for us. The margins are so thin and we're not making any money. We're just doing it because we love to do it.
Margot: It sounds like you're in a really sensitive moment for your business where you're making some decisions around how to grow and how to stay viable, at least. It sounds like you are growing out of your current space?
Benford: It’s kind of growth. It's a good challenge for us to figure out how to do this in a way where it doesn't need to be subsidized by Erik's paychecks. I really do think that there's some solution here. I hear stories from folks and think how'd you pay for this? Like, what's really going on? You can afford to do no sprays and lose most of your crop. You must not have to worry about paying rent or something.
There can also be some blanket judgments on how people grow things that don't speak to the ideals of what everybody would like to see, but are actually people grounded in doing the work and figuring it out.
Margot: I'm seeing a connections between what you're saying and some of the folks I know in places like Maryland or Virginia who are growing grapes, for example. It's kind of a different situation often than with folks who are in California growing grapes, in terms of the way that the grapes are treated and say, whether they're spraying, or how much they ascribe to certain schools of thought.
Erik: What can we do in the realm we are in, to make it work? Ultimately it's about—how can we all make better ciders and better wines? How do we grow every year? There's no judgment.
Margot: I love that. Thanks so much for your time. I feel like I learned a lot about your situation and the way that you approach what you're doing.
You can support Floral Terranes by buying their ciders and wines. Follow them on Instagram to stay up on their work. Hit up Vom Boden to get their ciders and wines into your shop/bar/restaurant.
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