It is tempting to imagine that the resurgence of Virginia hard cider had its genesis in a single moment: Monticello’s Director of Gardens and Grounds Peter Hatch and Virginia gentleman Tom Burford kneeling together with their grafting knives to re-propagate the Virginia Hewe’s Crab apple tree in Thomas Jefferson’s north orchard.

While the image isn’t quite true to life, it represents the way Burford has used the return of Thomas Jefferson’s fruit trees to Monticello to spread his own message: People should be making cider out of obscure apple varieties, because a long time ago they were worth their weight in gold. Newtown Pippin, Harrison, Hewe’s Crab, Roxbury Russett, Ashmead’s Kernel, Esopus Spitzenburg, Red Limbertwig. The names evoke a world of abundance, specificity, and sophistication that characterized the apple trade when cider was king. Today, there are only three commercial cider producers in Virginia.

A modern day Johnny Appleseed, part philosopher and part planter, Burford wants to put hard cider back on the dinner table, and he thinks teaching people to grow the right kind of apples is the way to do it. “The barriers are access to cider making varieties. Demand is greater than supply. And here is another pitfall. If we begin to use less than appropriate varieties we are going to produce inferior ciders,” Burford said.

The beginning
Hatch came to Monticello in 1978 to help execute the vision of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation to restore the estate’s gardens and fruit orchards. The plan was to recreate Monticello’s missing landscape features within the second roundabout, about 200 yards from the house. Between 1979 and 1981, an archeological crew directed by William “Wild Bill” Kelso found 59 original tree stains in a grid pattern in the south orchard that matched Jefferson’s meticulous base drawings. Hatch used Jefferson’s orchard lists to set about obtaining original varieties and re-planting Jefferson’s experimental fruit orchard.

“We bragged about it at the time, that we could make this the most accurate garden restoration that had ever taken place in this country. And in some ways, in terms of the bones and structure of the garden we were successful,” Hatch said.

A Michigan native who came to Monticello after starting the horticulture program at Old Salem, Massachusetts, Hatch realized that one of the challenges of restoring Jefferson’s orchards was keeping them healthy. Another was finding authentic versions of commercially extinct varieties, ones that hadn’t been corrupted, mislabeled or misrepresented in some way.

In the process he reached out to various local apple experts, like Dr. Ellwood Fisher at James Madison University and Tom Burford. Hatch doesn’t remember his first encounter with Burford.

“Tom just showed up one day in 1982 or 1983. We had actually gone to other people to initially find the historic varieties for the orchard. I had done a study, a historical study, of varieties that Jefferson documented in his orchards. We bought stuff and we grafted stuff and we collected stuff,” Hatch said.

Burford recalls their history more broadly, saying he was summoned to Monticello on the understanding that Hatch was having trouble locating authentic versions of some varieties Jefferson had cultivated.

“Thirty-one years ago, Peter Hatch, young punk, had come to Monticello. He’d been at Old Salem and did a lot of the garden design there. He called me and said, ‘Someone said the Burfords have many of the Jeffersonia varieties, do you have them?’ and I said ‘Yes, Peter, I believe I have most of them,’” Burford said.

Burford, whom Hatch has since dubbed “Professor Apple,” occupies a singular place in the apple world as a source of knowledge, an evangelist, and a raconteur of America’s first fruit.
“The consummate Virginia gentleman, font of traditional knowledge and the dean of American apples. I don’t know how else you’d describe him. He’s one of the most gracious guys I’ve ever met in my life,” Ben Watson, New England-based author of Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions and Making Your Own, said.

Burford and Hatch like to butt heads about things—like the origin of the Father Abraham apple, and Jefferson’s legacy with the land—but they are good friends and collaborators. Hatch values Burford’s ability both to appreciate the proper balance between sugar, acid, and tannin in a fine cider while grasping the practicalities of growing fruit. His old Virginia accent is a bonus.

“He’s a storyteller. He has real vernacular roots in this part of the world. He combines the elegance and cosmopolitan tastes he learned at the University of Virginia and through extensive world traveling with the down home roots coming from a tradition of farmers and apple growers. You don’t find many of those people anymore,” Hatch said.

Hatch thinks the Father Abraham was one of many varieties to be developed in Virginia in the early 18th century, a period he calls the dawn of American agricultural trade. Burford identifies Father Abraham, in his 1991 book Apples: A Catalogue of International Varieties, as an alternative name for the Danziger Kantapfel, a German variety.

Not lost in the argument is the point that nurseries were big business when cider was the drink of choice at American dinner tables and their catalogues were filled with hundreds of varieties of apples. How many grocery store varieties can you name? Ten? As part of his effort to understand Jefferson’s orchard, Hatch has documented the emergence of cultivated local varieties from the massive seedling orchards that sprung up along the James River in the early colonial years.

“If you look at the nursery lists in American newspapers before 1830, you see that in the big nurseries on the East Coast they’re importing English apples,” Hatch said. “But if you go to Pittsburgh or Fredericksburg or Lynchburg, you see in the advertisements these local varieties are emerging and that was the beginning of Virginia agriculture in many ways, this emergence of these accidental varieties that were suited to the climate here.”

The Fruits and Fruit Trees of Monticello, his book, offers an inside look at Jefferson’s life as an experimental horticulturist, but the restoration of the cider orchard has created a point of departure for the resurgence of heritage apple varieties in Virginia.

Hatch, the scientist, and Burford, the messenger, planted the north orchard with Hewes Crab apples in 1992. Burford provided grafting stock and consulted on the layout. He would walk side by side with fruit gardener Kerry Gilmer telling him how to care for the trees. The Hewes Crab was Jefferson’s premier cider apple (though the lost Taliaferro variety produced his favorite stuff). It was a Virginia apple, partial to Virginia soil and climate, that had emerged near Williamsburg around 1700.

“It was by far the most popular apple variety in Virginia in the 18th century, the most important variety of plant other than maybe some tobacco varieties for economic purposes,” Hatch said.

Professor Apple
After a disappointing run as a ferryman on the York River, Daniel Burford came up the James River to Lynchburg in 1713 and planted apple orchards. Since then, Burfords have been growing apples in Amherst County. Tom grew up on a working farm where his family had over 120 apple varieties and drank cider and apple toddies at the table.

“It was cold. You’d been out working in the orchard or the sawmill. The 7-year-old system knew how to handle it,” Tom said of the cider.

Tom’s parents home-schooled him, his mother insisting on his learning Greek, Latin and Hebrew and his father encouraging him to experience the farm.

“From my earliest recollection, the quest for experience and learning was overriding everything else. It was a demon of sorts,” Burford said.

When he was 16, Tom boarded a train for Charlottesville and enrolled at the University of Virginia, where he studied philosophy. His father, wanting his son to avoid the heartache of farming, had urged him to study a practicable trade. Tom’s interests were far-ranging and limitless, but his connection to his family farm was unshakable.

With his brother Russell, Tom started Burford Brothers, an umbrella company for enterprises that included a sawmill, a forestry business, and a construction company that specialized in passive solar construction. The company designed and manufactured a solar domestic hot water system that they eventually sold to the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Tom describes Russell as a “primordial” tool maker and inventor. The two men built replica World War I bi-planes and flew them around Amherst County. But the family farm and agriculture continued as an important enterprise. In the ’80s Tom ran a nursery with between 10,000 and 15,000 trees, selling them nationally to people looking for heritage apple stock.

You have to experience Tom to understand his gift. He can tell you the story of American apples from 1600 to the present in a breezy way, touching on the vast seedling orchards that populated the James River Valley before the dawn of leisure time in the 1750s that led to the cultivation of valuable varieties. Then on through the cider heydays to the dawn of the steam engine and an agricultural revolution that industrialized and regionalized local economies. Access to other forms of alcohol and sugar made cider less important. The apples gathered in surplus piles, attracting insects that devastated crops. Chemical companies invented pesticides and perfected DDT, which killed all the honeybees. By World War II apples were being grown for motorists touring the countryside in autumn and for grocery stores, where they were shined and stacked to be eaten with the eyes.

Talk with Tom once and you understand why people are drawn to him, and, in turn, how he draws people to apples. You get the sense he has discovered many things about life along the way, but his love for apples and trees are among the simplest and most satisfying.

“Every day I learn something new when I walk through an orchard. At 76, when somebody says, ‘Well you know it all,’ I say, ‘I wish I did.’ I’m just beginning. Particularly as the world changes around us,” Burford said.

But lest you think old Tom is just a storyteller, take his quest for the Harrison apple as proof of his punch. The New Jersey variety, which William Coxe identified as a superior cider production apple in his 1817 catalogue, was one that Tom’s father had actively searched for during his life, in part because it was said to yield 25 percent more juice per volume and sold for four times the price of other varieties.

According to Tom, he discovered a Harrison apple tree in a derelict orchard at the home of a friend of a friend in Paramus, New Jersey. After dinner the elegant octegenarian said he thought he might have a rare apple tree and sent Tom out to inspect it with a groundskeeper.

“I just about fainted. It was the gut feeling: This is a Harrison. So I was mute for a while and I went back and told him I think you have a very rare apple out there that’s one I’ve been looking for and one my father looked for for many years,” Burford said.

He took a cutting on the condition he would never tell anyone where he got it and after growing the tree, announced he had found the long lost Harrison. He has since worked tirelessly to convince people of its virtue––namely the perfect balance of sugar, acid and tannin for cider––with a certain amount of success.

Johnny Appleseed
Diane Flynt was the first commercial dry cider maker in Virginia’s new era. When she and her husband bought their farm between Floyd and the Blue Ridge Parkway in the mid-1990s, there weren’t any footsteps to follow.

The farm at Foggy Ridge was the result of a committed search she conducted with her husband Chuck in preparation for leaving behind their corporate lives for agricultural ones. They found the land first, and the land was made for apples. Diane had a seven-year plan to learn how to run an orchard and cider operation as she transitioned out of work.

Looking for know-how, she got hooked into the national scene of cider makers. There were only a handful then. Steve Wood had been growing cider varieties since the early ’80s at Poverty Lane Orchards near Lebanon, New Hampshire. Terrence Maloney was making cider at West County Cider in Colrain, Massachusetts. There were a few others out west.

Naturally, Flynt found her way to Tom Burford.

“I was connected to Tom just through the apple world. His name came up. I think Steve Wood asked me if I knew him,” Flynt said.

Wood had been making English cider under the name Farnum Hill Cider from apples he grew in his orchards, many of which were traditional French and English cider varieties. He has been a mentor to many cider producers since, in part because of his background in running a commercial fruit growing operation that once focused on putting McIntosh and Cortland apples in grocery stores.

Flynt consulted Burford on the layout and variety list for her orchard. Tom told her to plant Harrisons.

“I think Tom is a national treasure for many reasons. His knowledge base...to have grown up with the number of apple varieties he did and to have known them intimately,” Flynt said.

“You can read books. You can talk to pomologists who know the science. But nothing in the world of farming substitutes for experience.”

Flynt, whose farm sits at a 3,000' elevation in prime apple growing territory, put 40 Harrisons into her test orchard, which contained 30 varieties and around 300 trees. Today she believes she has the largest Harrison planting in the country.

Flynt’s Foggy Ridge cider sells in big wine markets like Charleston, Chapel Hill, and New York. But she has taken up Tom’s mission to spread the word about planting cider varieties locally. This year, she convinced John Saunders of Silver Creek Orchard in Nelson County to take enough grafting wood from her orchard to plant 5,000 new trees, including Hewe’s Crab, Ashmeade’s Kernel, and Harrison varieties.

She and Burford have started Apple Corps, a project aimed at identifying valuable old apple varieties on forgotten trees.

“The real idea is to find apples in your own backyard or at your neighbor’s farm or in a cemetery that are good apples and are interesting apples and bring them to Tom and let’s figure out what they are,” Flynt said.

Flynt makes a clean-tasting, American-style blended cider, and she isn’t sentimental about the challenge she faces in getting people to buy it.

“We need to make cider that is so good that people buy it and drink it in preference to what they’re currently buying and drinking,” Flynt said. “The story only gets us so far. We need them to come back and buy it every week like they buy a New Zealand sauvignon blanc. We are in the premium wine market and that’s a pretty small market and it’s a global competition.”

Vintage Virginia
In 2009 the competition got local when Albermarle Ciderworks began selling hard cider made from Virginia-grown heirloom apple varieties out of another orchard Burford helped start. It takes from five to seven years for apple trees to mature and bear fruit. Back in 1991, Hatch and Burford held the inaugural Monticello apple tasting to expose people to the diversity of flavors, textures and characters of apple varieties that had fallen by the wayside.

At the same time, just a little ways down Hwy. 29 from Monticello, the Shelton family was deciding what to do with the farm they had purchased in 1986. The family was scattered at that point, but Charlotte Shelton, who had been living in Savannah, moved back and attended the apple tasting in 1993. Her brother and business partner, Chuck, who was already experimenting with making cider on the farm, attended the event in 1994.

Chuck remembers tasting 50 varieties, all the while listening to the Burford and Hatch routine.

“It was kind of an eye-opening experience with all of these varieties and delicious flavors,” Chuck said.

Charlotte, a history buff, realized the Sheltons and Burfords had family connections through Amherst County. Tom was still running his nursery and was able to help Charlotte obtain heirloom tree varieties, offering the Shelton’s grafting stock of Hewes Crab from the Monticello Orchard. The Sheltons bought into the idea of an orchard and cider operation.

Chuck remembers eating Stayman, Winesap and Grimes apples when he was growing up. A neighbor, Ronnie Toms, told him his family had a 1,500-tree orchard of 100-
year-old Albemarle Pippins in the Hungrytown area of Heard’s Mountain until they were cut down in the 1950s. In a sense, the Sheltons are just turning back the clock.

Burford thinks cider will take off when commercial orchards start producing cider varieties suited to the local climate.

“What happened in the wine industry years ago is happening in the cider industry now. There are orchardists who are realizing they can grow apples and sell them to cider makers without having any interest in making cider,” Burford said.

Vintage Virginia Apples, the Sheltons’ orchard business, now grows over 230 varieties of apples on 10 acres of trees, and many of them are varieties especially suited to local growing conditions. Chuck says the apples have informed the cider he makes.

“We tried a few of the English cider varieties and they just don’t do well for this climate or the land that we’re growing on,” Shelton said. “What does well is Winesap and Stayman and that’s another reason I think we’re more of a traditional early American cider. We’re not trying to put Kingston Black in here.”

But like Diane Flynt, Chuck Shelton doesn’t want his cider operation to be a nostalgia act. Albemarle Ciderworks markets its Jupiter’s Legacy cider with the historical narrative of Jupiter Evans, the slave who served as Jefferson’s cider maker. This year they’ll also release a Hewe’s Crab cider made entirely from apples grown in Monticello’s north orchard.

Chuck sees the history narrative as part of a larger effort to re-acquaint consumers, retailers, and chefs with really good cider.

“We’ve got to be moving on two fronts, the public demand and the knowledge of how to present it and use it,” he said. “The whole culinary history of cider needs to be redeveloped.”

Castle on a hill
Castle Hill became the area’s newest cider producer when it opened a tasting room in July. John Rhett of Rhett Architects was charged with re-developing the property––the historic estate of Colonel Thomas Walker––for its owners. It was his impetus to put in an orchard and make cider. He asked Stuart Madany to manage production.

“John had just bought some apple trees from the Sheltons not very long before and they were working on becoming a producing cidery at the time. He had gotten a fresh exposure to their apples,” Madany said. “From a landscape design point of view, he thought an orchard was more appealing and he was planting trees himself, so he said let’s investigate this.”

Enter Tom Burford. Rhett and Madany invited Tom out to look at the lay of the land and offer ideas for an orchard.

“Tom came with a couple bags of Pippins and when he first arrived he said, ‘The Albemarle Pippin returns to Castle Hill,’ and told us how the apple had first come to Albemarle County at Castle Hill,” Madany said.

Burford also told them Castle Hill would have been planted with apples as late as the 1930s.
“Tom can really sort of romance one with the intrigues of apple growing,” Madany said. “The owners said let’s go ahead.”

Castle Hill’s orchard isn’t bearing fruit yet, but they’ve already started making cider, which they sell from a tasting room for now, until their distribution permit comes. Their arrival on the cider-making scene is important in a number of ways.

There’s the fact that Rhett initially invited Gabriele Rausse to examine the site for its suitability for grape production as an agricultural application for an estate with an ownership group with deep pockets. Rausse is one of the handful of people credited with the maturation of Virginia wine-making, and he thought a vineyard would work.

Instead, and with some cajoling from Burford, Castle Hill chose to make organic apple cider through a fermenting process that uses terracotta amphorae called kvevri. The production method reflects another influence from the wine industry. Rhett had tasted the wine of Josko Gravner, who uses the method in Italy, and was won over by the idea of making cider with an ancient and green production process.

Castle Hill ciders ferment in 6', 500-gallon kvevri that sit in the ground, which regulates their temperatures. Madany calls it “an American cider with English influences,” and said that its real character will evolve as they get more experienced using their singular method.

“We’re the only people making cider in a kvevri in the world, so our style is going to be evolving as we go,” Madany said.

Steve Wood is watching the Virginia cider scene closely from his perch in New Hampshire, because he sees the potential at the intersection of the wine and cider worlds to create locally specific varieties that have broad appeal.

“Wine is the only agricultural product I know that not only doesn’t penalize small differences between similar things but actually pays for it, actually honors it with price,” Wood said. “Nobody expects a Bordeaux variety based blend to taste or smell like one grown in Napa Valley or Southwest Australia. As a model, wine is a hopeful precedent for cider.”

To put the precedent in perspective: In 1979, when Kelso’s team was excavating Jefferson’s fruitery, there were four commercial wineries in Virginia.

Still, the hardened pro in the American cider scene, Wood said if he had to pick one path to go down for his commercial orchard—instead of pursuing three at once as he does now—he’d just plant cider varieties.

“I think the cool thing about the Virginia cider makers, there being very few of them, is they are basing their ciders chiefly on apples that they are more and more growing for the purpose of making them into cider,” Wood said.

Ben Watson, like Burford an apple bard, thinks we’re at a turning point in the American apple narrative.

“I think we’re discovering in some senses what was done 200 years ago, and on the other hand people are discovering the quality of these apples on their own and making their own decisions about how to use them,” Watson said.

Burford percolates with excitement when he talks about the future. He sees the impending danger of an industrial cider culture pumping out a “synthetic” product, on the one hand, but he also sees the potential for a new era of fine Virginia cider-making based on access to locally-grown Newtown Pippin, Winesap, Hewes Crab, and Harrison apples.

Ever the iconoclast, Burford has this to say about Thomas Jefferson: “He was very short-sighted and very selfish and I occasionally will make those remarks on the mountain and someone will get very upset, because it’s supposed to be sacred. But it’s not sacred. It’s a fact.”

But he can’t help invoking Monticello’s laird as he thinks about his own legacy.

“Just as Jefferson wanted three things on his tombstone, this would be the one apple thing that I would want: brought the Harrison apple back into cultivation,” Burford said.