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Who we are
We, the Maloney family –Terry, Judith, and Field—
began making hard cider commercially in l984. We’d been making cider for ourselves and our friends for years before that. We grow much of the produce that appears on our table. It makes sense to us to ferment cider from the apples of these hills.
We moved to the Northern Berkshires from Northern California in l972. This was Apple Country, not Grape Country. We didn’t find grapes for our year’s supply of wine, but instead we found a living, pleasurable
tradition.
We admired the hard cider our neighbors had been making for generations, using their own apples and those they gleaned from nearby favorite trees. We started doing the same, but applied California winemaking techniques to this seasonal Yankee tradition.
We were impressed by the variety and complexity of ciders that could be made from differing blends of apples and cellaring techniques. We decided that cider — a beverage long forgotten except in hill counties and countries — needed another chance. When we fermented our first vintage for sale in’84, we became the first U.S. winery to specialize in hard cider.
West
County Cider's
Judith Maloney shows off
a gift package of three
varieties with the
Catamount Orchards
behind her.
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Photo courtesy of Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture
(CISA, www.buylocalfood.com)
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Flavorful
varieties
We have an orchard of about 1400 trees of English, French, and American varieties of cider apples. Cider varieties are grown for pressing: their concentrated flavors that do so well in cider make for a surprising eating experience. To quote George Saintsbury, English bon-vivant, in ‘Notes on a
Cellar-Book’ (l933): “Cider-apples furnish one of the most cogent arguments to prove that Providence had the production of alcoholic liquors directly in its eye. They are good for nothing else whatever and they are excellent good for that”.
We begin making cider in late October, after the apples have matured. After we sort the apples, they are pressed into cider. Then we ferment and bottle the freshly-pressed juice in small batches at our Catamount Hill Bonded Cellar.
The varieties of apples fermented give each cider its particular flavor and structure. For example, Golden Russet is a sweet apple, low in acid and moderate in tannins. Kingston Black is acidic and tannic (bittersharp); Dabinett has lots of tannin and very little acid (bittersweet). We grow traditional American Roxbury Russet and Golden Russet, as well as Baldwin and Redfield in our orchard, along with the European varieties Tremlett’s Bitter, Reine de Pomme, and
Dabinett.
The test orchard has over twenty traditional American and European varieties. We make test batches from the fruit, and select promising varieties for larger scale planting.
What critics say
"The Next Great Drink
The Maloney family from Colrain, Mass, offers the lightest, cheerful bottled hard cider-the very thing to drink with dinner...
To appreciate the subtle location in the musical scale of the mouth of the taste of this hard cider from West County Hard Cider, first rid your taste buds of the things it is not. It is not dark, swilly and robust like regular cider (however good), nor does it have that slightly frustrating neither here nor there quality of a wine cooler. It's not wine of course, though there's a distant cousinship-pingponging from grape to apple-between the lightest of light white wine and this bubbly hard cider, which has less than half the alcohol (from four to six percent), a difference you can pleasantly appreciate when you can still read a book after dinner. This family winery, in business since l984, uses local apples (not from concentrate!) blending bittersharp and bittersweet ones with sharps like northern spy and sweets like red delicious. Too bad it must be called 'hard' because if anything it tastes and makes you feel easygoing. Also too bad the word 'refreshing' has been overused by tinny tacky soft drinks, because it well applies. It's an Emma Thompson of a drink, both modest and bracing. Bottled (no six packs) and capped, this cider goes very well, unobtrusively, indeed enhancingly, with food. It comes in 'bone-dry'to sweet-and even that is restrained-and can be found at DeLuca's, Martighetti, Hi-Rise Bread Company-and on tap at the Plough and Stars."
Mopsy Strange Kennedy, The Improper Bostonian Newspaper
"The temptation is to compare these ciders to a white wine. They have a similar complexity, though the alcohol content is consistently lower (4% to 7.5% by volume, compared with 8% to 14% for wine). Ultimately, though, this comparison is misleading. In hard-cider tastings, wine connoisseurs may find themselves at a loss for words; the vocabulary used to describe wine doesn't quite apply. These ciders, in short, must be appreciated in their own right. They are American classics, and their only equals belong to another age."
Thomas Christopher, Martha Stewart Living, October 2001
More 'Acclaim' in Saveur (The Saveur 100'), Jan.'03; Wine Spectator(9/02); New York Times('A Guide to Apple Ciders'),Jan '97;
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