Welcome, Vermont’s Eden Ice Cider

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Eleanor and Albert Leger.

We’re very pleased to bring Eden Ice Cider‘s unique line of “ice ciders” into the Cherry wine dot com family.

Albert and Eleanor Leger, the founders of Eden Ice Cider, are hard cider-dessert wine-apple specialists in hilly northern Vermont.

And their five fascinating products, which are winning awards at an almost alarming pace, span the boundaries of what we think we know about wine classifications.

Allow me to explain.

The Leger’s “ice ciders” combine characteristics of hard

Melting the concentrate.

cider, apple wine, ice wine, and dessert wine. And in case that description is not loose enough, their newest product, Orleans, is not a dessert wine at all, but a high-alcohol dry apple wine made in collaboration with maître liquoriste Deirdre Heekin, that’s flavored with organic herbs.

Albert, a French Canadian, follows Quebecois custom for making ice cider, which are similar to the German rules about what makes a traditional Riesling ice wine an authentic product. That is, in part, pressing your own apples and freezing/thawing the juice outdoors.

Eve would approve.

Other than pure creativity and lots of going of the extra mile, another common denominator running through these products are the inputs: fresh Vermont apples, many from their own orchard of 800 trees.

Some of the Leger’s ice ciders are varietal —  the Northern Spy and the Honeycrisp, while others are blends. The Leger’s make Windfall Orchard Ice Cider from the fresh juice of, and I am not kidding here, 30 different varieties of apple.

Their ice cider business has grown fast since 2007, and they now have good retail distribution in New York, Massachusetts and Vermont. But luckily, they can ship their wines to several states along the northern eastern seaboard and as far afield as Florida, Colorado and California.

Free shipping on orders of 6 bottles or more.

—Todd

 

 

 

 

 

Categories: Drinker's Blog