NV Hiyu Wine Farm "Germinal Cider I Mt. Hood" Hood River Cider 

By Nate Ready, Winemaker, on this Cider

“We started to plant a new orchard devoted to cider varieties in 2013, surrounded by forest and the hoofprints of elk. It’s taken a long time to bear, but we’re starting to harvest enough fruit to begin to release cider from these trees – this is the first one. Our goal was to create a cider with a completely different flavor profile than Floréal’s – while Germinal is made from bitter-sharp apples with high tannin + high acid, Floreal is made mostly from aromatic dessert apples (high sugar + high acid). ”

Fruit: Bittersharp Apples (Redfield, Bulmer’s Norman, Summerset Redstreak and Brown Snout), and rare heirloom dessert apples like Karmijn de Sonneville.

Making of: the apples are aged for a month after picking in order to ripen and concentrate, then milled and macerated for a week, and pressed in a basket press traditionally lined with biodynamic straw (used as a kind of sieve, but it also adds spiciness to the final flavor). The juice is then spontaneously fermented and aged in old barrels, without being topped up. In the next vintage, the fresh fermenting juice from the new crop is added in order to initiate the secondary fermentation in bottles and turn the beverage into a slightly sparkling one. Unsulfured, unfiltered, undisgorged. 

Personality: This new cider is deep gold in color with peach highlights. There is less CO2, but the texture of the bubbles is even more delicate and this characteristic carries through to the cider’s acidity. While Floreal is impressive for its concentration, this new cider is more subtle and refined texturally. The aroma is ultimately more complex, with striking floral overtones and aromas of elderberry and blackberry that weave in and out of exotic evocations of citrus.

Taste: Elderberry, peach, lime and fir tip.

Culture: A gathering amongst the mist and mossy rocks in the pool below a hidden waterfall.

Hiyu is a 30 acre farm in the Hood River Valley. Guided by nature and inspired by ideas from biodynamics and permaculture we tend vines, raise animals, garden, cook and make wine to reveal an experience of place. The vines are planted in silt loam over basalt on a southeast facing hillside above the Hood River. Our site lies just 22 miles from the summit of Mt. Hood and the wines are shaped by the weather from the mountain. The place is closest in climate to winegrowing areas in the Alps; the Savoie, Valais and Valle d’Aosta.

The property is composed of 14 acres of vines, 4 acres of field and pasture, .5 acres of market garden, 4 acres of forest and a pond. The rest of the acreage is in grounds that are being moved toward food forests. Outside a little work beneath the vines with a scythe, there is no mowing or tilling and any control of vegetation is done by the pigs, cows, chicken, ducks and geese that live with the vines during different parts of the year. We direct the diversity of plants on the site by seeding directly into the dense growth or behind the pigs as they root around in search of food.

We make a single cut of the vines at pruning, but there is no hedging, green harvest, leaf pulling or other interruption of the vines growing cycle. We spray 85% less material than a typical organic or biodynamic vineyard. There is no sulfur used. The primary control of mildew is with cinnamon oil and the other sprays are mixed herbal teas. The plantings have as much biodiversity as the understory. The property is divided into half acre blocks, each planted to a field blend from a different moment in the genetic history of the grapevine. There are over 80 different varieties of grapes and many more clonal selections planted on the farm.