Three families have farmed this ridge over the past 100+ years - Fashovers, Cassanellis and Abramsky Feldman Hales. Assiduously pruning and grafting every year, we have somehow managed to keep 40 heirloom apple varietals alive, though the oldest trees with their hollowed out trunks riddled with critter holes seem to defy gravity just by staying upright year after year. Because we dry farm the trees are always in stress, struggling for purchase on the steep hillsides, surviving long hot summer and fall days when even in wet years their roots can find no water by July. The only moisture they get is from the ocean, when diaphanous fogs roll over the ridges and settle for the night.
It’s that stress that concentrates the sugar in the fruit, giving the blended juice a caramelized honey finish and a perfume redolent with apple top notes, the barest hints of wood and sea and wild herbs.
Barndiva Farm Heirloom Apple Juice is the pivotal ingredient in a brown butter whiskey cocktail with thyme syrup we call Why Bears Do It. The bears never see the trees in blossom. By the time they wander down from the north most of the apples are gone, and those left scattered on the ground from harvest have begun to ferment into alcohol. The scent goes to their heads, driving them mad with desire, hence the name of the drink. I have no idea if it is indeed desire they feel as they trample through the orchards gouging on rotting apples and pulling down branches, leaning tipsily against the fragile trunks, leaving deposits of their gluttony everywhere, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
My Earth Day prayer is for the continued health of blossoms and bears everywhere, real, imagined, remembered.
The mighty Gravenstein, early and sweetly delicate.
