When Bob and Yannique Purman bought a house on Washington Island in 1996, they didn’t have a business plan for Island Orchard Cider, the growing young business they have since cultivated. At that time, they hadn’t even thought about starting a business here. They just liked the Island and wanted to put down roots, so to speak, so they could enjoy the peace, quiet and natural beauty.
“We had a sailboat back in the early ’90s,” Bob recalls, “and we’d sail out of Milwaukee with our young kids. Every summer we’d head up north to spend a week camping on Rock Island.”
They would come over to Washington Island, where Vi Llewellyn would pick them up in her taxi and take them to town to buy groceries and other supplies. In 1996, they decided to give up the boat in favor of a house on the Island, which they had come to enjoy even more than life on the water. “We were avid bikers,” says Bob, “and the Island was a great place to bicycle.”
The Purmans also did some biking in Brittany, where Yannique’s father lived, and there they encountered the traditional sparkling hard ciders of northern France. Served cold, with an alcohol content of 7 percent, they can replace wine with meals or simply be enjoyed as a refreshing beverage. “I didn’t know of anyone in the U.S. producing this kind of cider,” Bob recalls, and he also realized the climate and soil of Door County were similar to the conditions in northern France, which were conducive to growing the kinds of apples needed for the local ciders.
Inspired by that realization, Bob undertook cider making as a hobby, fermenting it in small batches from apples he bought from suppliers. But the more he learned and the more he immersed himself in the process, the more fascinated he became with the seasonal cycle of planting, tending, harvesting, fermenting and bottling, which give shape and rhythm to a cider maker’s life. Compared with his work as a documentary and advertising filmmaker, in which he was constantly reacting to other people’s needs and schedules, the regularity of the cider cycle seemed a haven.
“It’s an agriculture-based, value-added enterprise,” says Purman, “I feel like the whole process has been an interesting enrichment of my life. Every day I learn something new, and with cider there are permutations and an infinite variety of things you can do to alter and improve the product. Right now, for example, we’re working on a Royal Cider, with cherries, that we hope to distribute next fall.”
Moving from the five-gallon batches he made as a hobbyist to the 500- to 1,000-gallon tanks he’s now working with commercially was daunting but satisfying, he says. Purman read and studied on his own to develop his expertise, but he also learned from others. He volunteered on weekends at a small cidery near Burlington, Wis., and he took a seminar from a British cider maker at Cornell University in New York.
Finally, in 2006, he and Yannique took the plunge when they spent two years planting 1,000 apple and pear trees on acreage they bought on the Island. He had contracted with a nursery in upstate New York, affiliated with the Geneva Research Station, to provide the trees he needed to grow the Kingston Blacks, Brown Snouts and other varieties of apples needed for the range of ciders he produces. The orchard has since grown to accommodate 2,000 trees, including 29 varieties of French, British and American apples, which replicate the kinds used in French ciders.
“This isn’t an orchard where we planted some apple trees and then said, ‘Hey, lets make some cider,’” says Yannique. “These bitter sharp, sharp and dessert apples [the terms for the various classes of cider apples] are specially bred to make cider just the way they do it in France.”
Maintenance of the orchard falls mainly to Daniel Nerenhausen and his crew, who keep the trees trimmed and tended. “Cider apples don’t have to look pretty,” says Purman, “so we don’t have to treat them for cosmetic purposes. We’re not fully organic, but we keep chemical treatments to a minimum.” Given the drought conditions of some recent years, Purman has had to have a well dug for irrigation, adding to his expenses; but he keeps the operation simple.
“The apples are handpicked the old-fashioned way,” he says. The pickers, who include the Purmans and Nerenhausen’s crew, wear bags across their shoulders and empty them into one-bushel bins. The bins are emptied into larger, 4-foot by 4-foot bins, which hold 80 to 100 bushels each, before they’re transported to the Purmans’ Ellison Bay Cider House, where fermentation and bottling take place.
The first plantings of trees began to produce last year, and Island Orchard Ciders turned out 1,000 gallons in two styles [the term used in the industry for different types of ciders]. In 2012, they’ll bottle around 3,500 gallons, in five styles, and as much as 6,000 gallons this fall. They continue to plant additional trees and replace damaged ones (they lost about 100 in a windstorm last October), but since apple trees can bear fruit for 25 years, Purman hopes there won’t be a need for a major restoration – at least not in his lifetime.
Yannique Purman is in charge of marketing and distribution of the ciders, and her workload has increased each year. “We’re now distributing in 23 locations around Door County,” she says. “Grocery stores, liquor stores, restaurants. And we’re now available in five places in Milwaukee.”
On the Island, you can find Island Orchard ciders at Brothers Too, Fiddler’s Green, K.K. Fiske, and the Sailor’s Pub. “A lot of Islanders got their first taste of our ciders at the opening of the Island Dairy,” says Yannique. “And the reactions were gratifying. People were surprised and pleased with the flavors.”
Island Orchard products can be sampled at the Purmans’ production and tasting operation in Ellison Bay. And, as holiday seasons approach, Yannique Purman sees increased interest in the cider styles they’re offering.
“People are learning that the ciders can be used like champagne, before dinners,” she says. “But they’re also great with dinners – especially the holiday kind, with turkey and all that goes with it.”
And because these ciders have a shelf life of around two years, you can buy now and give later, says Yannique. “They make great holiday gifts for people who want to give friends a taste of the Island and of Door County.”
By Rich Shereikis
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