Foggy Ridge Cider debuted in 2004 in Dugspur in Southwest Virginia before shuttering in 2017; founder Diane Flynt now focuses on selling apples to other cider makers.
Diane Flynt has been growing apples in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia since 1997. When Foggy Ridge Cider debuted its first cider in 2004, she began growing something else — a reputation as one of the finest cider makers and apple growers in the country, and her work was recognized multiple times by the James Beard Foundation as her craft cider found its way onto menus at restaurants including Sean Brock’s Husk, Chicago’s Michelin-starred Smyth and Dan Barber’s famed farmstead venture Blue Hill at Stone Barns. We caught up with Flynt in advance of her keynote address at CiderCon, an educational, industry-focused gathering of growers and makers from across the country taking place Feb. 1-4 this year in downtown Richmond.
Richmond magazine: I know that education has been a part of your work for years now. What do you see as the differences among the makers that you’re talking to now compared with when you first started?
Diane Flynt, founder of Foggy Ridge Cider, will speak at CiderCon in Richmond this week.
Diane Flynt: I was the first cider maker in the South. We planted our orchard in 1997 and sold our first cider in 2004. We were the first licensed cidery solely devoted to cider. Back then, people didn’t know what it was. It was Woodchuck and us. Then Angry Orchard came and the more commercial Bold Rock-style cider, and people began to know about cider, and their introduction was often a very commercial product, as in your first introduction to beer being Bud Light. Nothing wrong with Bud Light, but it’s not a craft beverage. So, what I’ve seen is a ballooning of the industry with the entrance of these enormous players. Angry Orchard can buy ads at the Super Bowl. These are companies that can move the market just by dropping an ad.
The American Cider Association is a big-tent organization, and obviously it would not exist without the big producers because there wouldn’t be any budget without their money. But I think that what cider is facing now is it’s really teetering on this edge of respectability and acceptance, and consumers are open to trying lots of different things, and if the only thing we put in front of them is cider made with golden delicious or red delicious juice that’s watered down and sweetened and flavored, that doesn’t serve our industry well. So there are a lot of small cider makers that are exploring apples from their region. I see a time of exploration, and we need continued leadership from all segments of the cider world, not just the big producers.
RM: Can you share a bit about your decision to stop making cider and to focus exclusively on selling apples to other cider makers?
Flynt: We now sell our apples to other cider makers all over the South, not just in Virginia, and that has put me in touch with an exciting world of people who are doing amazing things with Southern fruit. Our own orchards have many Southern cider apples, but because of my elevation — we’re at 3,000 feet up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, way southwest, five hours from Richmond — I can grow English cider apples that don’t grow well in the Shenandoah and Piedmont region of Virginia, so we also have traditional English cider apples.
When I stopped making cider and started selling apples, I was approached by the University of North Carolina press and asked to consider writing a book on the history of apples in the South, and I’ve been working on that for the past two years. That process has put me in touch with this next generation of, not just cider makers, but apple growers who are experimenting with all kinds of things. They’re growing modern apples but also growing some of these old Southern varieties that have been used for cider for hundreds of years that people are taking another look at for many reasons, flavor being chief among them, but also because these apples flourished all over the South for years in these hot, humid conditions, which is what we have now as almost universal conditions. When I say the South, I mean some of the most famous Southern cider apples come from eastern North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee. Apples are widely adapted throughout the South, not just in the mountain South, which is where you think about apples in the South today.
RM: Can you share some of the cider makers who are doing things that really excite you right now?
Flynt: One of the ones I’m most excited by is James Creek Cider House in Cameron, North Carolina. It’s in the sandhills, so they’re growing cider apples in sandy soil in a Zone 8 climate. They’re finding that some of these old Southern varieties, like Mattamuskeet, an old apple named for the Mattamuskeet native American tribe.
Wise Bird cider in Lexington, Kentucky. They are using a lot of juice from Virginia, but what I find interesting is they’re trying to get the University of Kentucky to test apple cider varieties at their research station and convince Kentucky apple growers to grow those apples. To me, that’s as important as anything else. They’re trying to keep these orchards growing by creating a good economy.
And then I think people don’t know how aggressive Courtney [Mailey] of [Richmond’s] Blue Bee Cider is at working with growers in Virginia to have them grow good cider apples. She’ll take their fruit and encourage them to grow fruit and promise to buy it, and that partnership between commercial growers and cider makers is exciting to me.
RM: We hear so many of the same tired, white-washed anecdotes about cider’s American history, but I’m curious what actually surprised you from your research.
Flynt: You’re exactly right. I use that word “tired” a lot. In fact, when I was making cider and would invariably get calls from journalists in the fall, and I’d tell them, “if you start this article talking about how Thomas Jefferson made cider, you can’t interview me,” because those stories are flattened and they don’t talk about the fact that the enslaved people who worked for Jefferson made the cider.
If you Google “first apple orchard in America,” Reverend Blackstone in Massachusetts comes up. Well, Jamestown had an apple orchard 11 years before that. But we also know that apples spread very quickly when they arrived in the South, so when the white farmers pushed into central and south Alabama and came on the old French fort at Mobile, it was surrounded by an apple orchard. The English and French fur traders who pushed into the South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia mountains, that predated the farmer settlers, they took apples with them, so when the white farmers came in to take over the native land and farm it by their methods, they found the Cherokee and the Creek already growing apples.
The Cherokee orchards were quite extensive. At the time of the Indian Removal Act, the largest population of indigenous people in the east were in Georgia, and they were forcibly evicted from their land through the Trail of Tears. After the Indian removal, a Georgia nurseryman named Jarvis Van Buren went into that territory over several years and gathered grafting wood from those Cherokee orchards and introduced apples to the nursery trade that he named, and he often chose Cherokee place names for those apples. So the Southern apple is grafted onto the trunk of a Cherokee apple tree. Many Southern varieties have Cherokee origins.
RM: It feels like the cider industry in the U.S. is at a particularly pivotal point right now. Is there any message you’d like to share about the future of the cider industry?
Flynt: It is more expensive to grow apple varieties that have more flavor, and if consumers are not willing to pay more, it’s not going to happen. Most cideries — the highly commercial cideries — see themselves as competing with beer and spirits. Well, beer and spirits are made with row crops and water. They are a lot cheaper to make than something made with apples that you grow by hand, prune by hand and pick by hand, just like grapes. There is no way that cider can compete on price with cheap alcohol because it’s mostly water. Every industry is going to have producers at all levels, but if we want to have a seat at the table at what I consider serious American beverages, that’s not going to happen with the cider made with water and sweetened with cane sugar. It’s going to happen with fruit that’s grown in a place that has some kind of provenance and interest and value in addition to flavor.
