Tall and slim, his face reddened by sun-drenched outdoor work, Bleecker Wheeler holds out a ripe, tennis-ball-sized apple and slices it in half.
“You take an apple and you cut it in half like this,” he says, “and you see the five seeds in there… each of those would create a totally new apple species that's never, ever existed before… It's true for all apples… Every single one of these seeds is gonna be something that's never existed before. That's the way apples work.”
Bleecker and his wife, Jenn, and their neighbors, Ally Rotondo and Cein Watson, are the co-founders and co-owners of Watson Wheeler Cider, based in Shaftsbury. “It's two couples,” Wheeler explains, “four people, everybody trying to wear all the hats, everybody picking up all the pieces cover for each other because we're all stretched so thin, just trying to keep this business going while doing all the other things in life.”
Their operation is based in a two-story barn on a stunning heritage hilltop farm. Fall sunshine blazes down on a long feed tray full of wet, glistening apples, at the tail end of which Jenn scoops up washed and culled fruit and dumps it into an electric masher. When the bucket below the masher fills, she and Cein dump the contents into the apple press, a Slovenian invention, Wheeler says – a large cylinder with slits in its outside walls and a large water bladder at its center. The pulp is dumped between the bladder and the wall, then the bladder gets filled with a hose, pressing the juice from the pulp and causing it to flow out through the slits, rippling down the sides “like the intro to the movie, The Matrix,” Wheeler says, “where all the green numbers and things are trickling down.” The juice then flows through tubing into a larger drum.
This is all to say that the two-families’ cider operation is fairly low-tech. The small masher pump runs on electricity, the press runs on water, and all the fermenting work is done by time and yeast. Of course, it also requires plenty of human labor: the picking and hauling and bottling, the shipping and the selling. The end results are a series of subtle, unique ciders that are closer to wine in both flavor and philosophy. These are not the mass-produced ciders one finds in most groceries or bars.
“We keep things kind of small and simple. Don't complicate it,” Wheeler says. “We do it in a more intimate way and a more involved and kind of small-batch way, because it's what we like.”
Apple orchards take a long time to grow, Wheeler says, and while they planted apple trees when they started the business, in the meantime, their production has been supplied mainly by foraged apples, he says, “and we started telling stories about each of our bottles… [For example] apples of unknown origin from the Green Mountain National Forest. We found a cornucopia of wild and uncultivated apples late in the season and this is what they gave us.”
They call their ciders “location-based,” meaning they are made from single orchards or areas. “We're hyper-focused on creating something that is, you know, very representative of its terroir,” Wheeler says, “of wherever we got the apples. Because we've discovered that people really love that.” Like their popular Enter the Sandgate cider made only from apples found in Sandgate. “Sandgate people buy the hell outta that stuff,” he says, “because they're like, ‘These are the trees I drive by every single day.’ In fact, some of the people are like, ‘Some of my trees, some of my apples even made it in there,’ you know?”
The enterprise came together during Covid. The Wheelers had just moved to Bleecker’s family farm in Shaftsbury, where “the trees are wicked old,” Wheeler says. “It's where I kind of fell in love with making cider as a kid. And with my family, we'd get together every fall and press fresh juice.” Someone then introduced Bleecker and Jenn to their new neighbors, Ally and Cein, who had also just moved to Shaftsbury to take over Cein’s grandmother’s ten-generation farm. They met over baby stroller walks and bonded over a shared love of cider making and woodworking (both Bleecker and Cein are carpenters).
Cider has been made on Cein’s family farm (a mile from the Wheeler Farm) for over 200 years. And, since the trees are all planted from seed (instead of by grafting, which is akin to cloning, in that it aims to create identical, predictable apple varieties), Wheeler explains, “[Cein's] orchard consists of apples that literally do not exist anywhere else in the world, because they are grown from seed… So when it comes to a truly authentic family heirloom – you know, Vermont heritage cider – it is as authentic as it gets.”
Watson Wheeler’s authenticity is reflected in the unusual names they come up with for their cider vintages. “We come up with some pretty silly names,” Wheeler says. Like: Wildman – a foraged blend from the mysterious and forgotten areas in and around the foothills of Glastenbury; or The Bennington Triangle – made from apples in an area that has a mysterious history of people going missing. But there are others, like Fireside Frost – from apples around Bennington Country, the land of Robert Frost, or The Four Winds – a wickedly delicious cider sourced from the heirloom apples on Cein’s 10-generation farm and aged in oak casks. “You get a lot of time to stand around thinking of names when you're sorting apples,” Wheeler jokes.
Most of the company’s ciders are sold through Vermont general stores and farmers’ markets. They are not sold outside the state. Yet demand has lapped up supply. Last year, Wheeler says, they produced about 2,400 gallons, which translates to over 10,000 bottles.
“We don't ever want to get so big,” Wheeler says, “that we're not getting our hands dirty… We can't imagine ourselves hiring out the work that we do because I mean, let's be honest, tomorrow I'm gonna drive up into the middle of the Green Mountain National Forest during foliage season with nobody else around me. I'm gonna pick apples all day. I would do that if I wasn't making money from it, you know what I mean?... My absolute favorite part of my job are the days that I get to go into areas like that and pick apples. And days like today aren't bad either….
“We could make a lot more cider with a lot less effort, if we had, and we will one day have, thousands of our own apple trees… We do want to grow the business, but we never want to stop doing what you're looking at us do right now. Because, you know, once we're not hands on, it just becomes sort of, we just own it. We're not partaking in it. So it'll be interesting to see what happens when our own orchards start to produce and we need to, you know, prune them or harvest them. I like to think that we'll hire people to do that part of the job, but the founders of the company will still get to do the fun part, which is to go exploring and driving around and making these small batches of unique, location-based ciders. Because that really has distinguished us as a cidery from other places.”
