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Poverty Lane Finds
Niche with Antique Apples

by Ryan Newswanger

Spend a morning walking through Poverty Lane Orchards with Steve Wood, and you'll come to believe that apple trees grow stories as well as fruit. "This is a French cooking apple called Calville Blanc d'Hiver," he says, pointing at an oblong apple with ribs as pronounced as an acorn squash's. "You can see it in French still-life paintings from 200 years ago."

He stops to gaze up at the green apples on an unruly, broad-branching tree. "Esopus Spitzenberg - Thomas Jefferson's favorite apple. He planted them at Monticello." He fingers the underside of a leaf to check for insect damage. "The fruit is truly stunning: spicy, acidic, but a little sweet as well. It makes an excellent cider base."

He tells more stories as he walks through the wet grass - how Baldwins were once the dominant New England apple; how he's grafted slim branches from the oldest tree in the Pacific Northwest onto a gnarled trunk in his own orchard; how certain inedible apples make the best hard cider.

But perhaps the most compelling story in the orchard is how Steve and his wife Louisa Spencer are banking the future of their farm on the idea that others will find antique apples and hard cider as enticing as they do.

"If we can't find a way to make this land produce a viable crop, it won't survive as farmland when we're done," Steve says while looking across the Lebanon orchards he's worked since 1965, and owned since 1984. "We've taken a flier at making a good decision for the future of the land."

From Hobby to Business Plan
Ten years ago Poverty Lane Orchards grew McIntoshes and Cortlands - the mainstays of the New England apple market - to sell to the wholesale market. Steve dabbled with collecting antique apple varieties, "the way a clockmaker collects old clocks," and sold a few of the unusual fruits at his farm stand.

He was amused at how people would drive all the way from Rhode Island to buy a half-peck of an old, forgotten apple variety. But as a glut of apples on the worldwide market lowered the prices paid to growers, the fervor of antique-apple fans raised an intriguing option. Faced with the choices of Get Big or Get Out, Steve chose another direction: Get Niche.

"The scale of our bony hillside farms here means that we need to make more money per fruit than larger farms elsewhere," he says. "We focused on growing antique and cider apples as an alternative to stopping altogether."

Poverty Lane Orchards still grows McIntoshes and Cortlands and does a brisk business with those varieties during pick-your-own season. But Steve now sells his high-quality antique apples directly to select markets in Philadelphia, New York City, and Houston instead of packing large numbers of Macs and Cortlands for warehouses.

Upper Valley shoppers don't have to travel to a big city to enjoy these apples: they are sold at the Hanover and Lebanon Co-op Food Stores, the Upper Valley Co-op, and the orchard itself.

The Taste of the Land
Long rows of stout trees in a back orchard tell the story of Poverty Lane's business change. Steve parts a tree's branches to show where he's grafted scions - new shoots - of antique Golden Russet apples onto a trunk which formerly grew McIntoshes.

Golden Russets have met the criteria Steve uses for deciding which antique varieties he will grow commercially. "An apple needs to be 'dynamite' in some way," Steve explains. "It has to have great flavor or aroma." Looks are also important. "It's fine if a fruit is spectacularly ugly, just as long as it's distinctive," Steve says. Brown-skinned russeted apples draw attention because they look so different from the waxy perfection of more common apples. But the most important consideration is whether an apple thrives in the specific climate and soil of the orchard.

This goes beyond just making sure the variety produces dependable crops. "I want our soil and weather to put their signature on the character of the apple," Steve says. "Empire and Red Delicious apples taste the same, no matter where they are grown. I want fruit that tastes like it could only have been grown here."

Poverty Lane conducts extensive trials on hundreds of apple varieties, grafting antique apple scions onto existing trees and carefully tasting the apples once the tree has fruited. Antique scions come from many places, Steve says. "It's not unusual for someone to show up on our doorstep with a handful of branches and a story about the tree in their backyard."

A common misconception about antique apples is that they are in danger of being lost. Steve points out that scions from most of the apple varieties which were once grown in the United States are still available from the Gene Plasm Repository in Geneva, New York. "We're not a non-profit apple museum, trying to save old apples," Steve says. "We're a business trying to find a niche market."

But growing antique apples is different from most businesses in that the product can take up to ten years to literally bear fruit. A graft onto an existing tree takes two or three years to produce apples. If the apple is deemed worthy of commercial growing, Steve sends grafting wood to a commercial nursery - a step which takes at least a year - and then plants the hundreds of young trees he receives. In four or five years the trees will produce a dependable crop.

"You need to take the long-term view in this business," Steve says. "The tough thing is that market conditions may have changed greatly by the time you're ready to sell your fruit."

But the unusual nature of the antique apples makes it easier to get retailers interested. "When storekeepers taste the apples, they're usually thrilled, and want to carry them immediately," he says.

'Weird' Apples for Hard Cider
Poverty Lane's barn formerly housed a mechanical apple packer, back when the orchard shipped McIntoshes and Cortlands. Now the long cement-floored packing room is nearly empty, and two giant coolers hold wooden barrels of aging hard cider instead of boxes of apples.

After several trips to English cider orchards and several cider-making courses, Steve planted 1,000 trees to grow what he calls "weird brown inedible apples" in 1990. The first Poverty Lane cider was bottled in 1995. Steve has continued to refine his cider-making skills and marketing knowledge since that time and has expanded his hard cider orchard to over 30 acres - the largest pure cider-apple planting in the United States.

Much like wine, true hard cider bears the character of the place where the fruit is grown. The beverage also bears the mark of the cider-maker, who mixes apple varieties to produce cider with specific tastes in mind. Steve makes semi-dry and extra-dry "Farnum Hill Cider" in fizzy and still versions, as well as a Farmhouse Cider. All are available at the Hanover and Lebanon Co-op Food Stores in 750 ml bottles. Farmhouse Cider is on tap at local pubs, including the Seven Barrel Brewery in Lebanon and the Flying Goose Brewpub in New London.

Steve acknowledges the risks he is taking in this venture. Although it's popular in Great Britain, hard cider - especially hard cider that's not overly fizzy and sweet - is virtually unknown in America. Selling cider is a matter of creating demand, instead of simply meeting it. "We'll need a lot of thirsty people to make this viable," he says.

Poverty Lane produced 5,000 gallons of their ciders in 1999. A portion of last year's product remains unsold, as the orchard only distributes the cider in New Hampshire. In previous years, the orchard has poured gallons of unsold cider down the drain, a practice that Steve chalks up to learning a new craft. He hopes that recent media exposure - including articles in upcoming issues of Martha Stewart Living and Wine and Spirits - will open new markets to make further distribution feasible.

Steve comments that the recent changes in Poverty Lane's business have made him into a marketer and business analyst as well as a cider maker, fruit grower, historian, and botanist. And, unlike many small-business owners, he must cope with apple maggots and aphids and deer, who nip tender apple shoots at an alarming rate.

But in spite of the pressures from orchard pests and a tricky market, Steve retains his sense of humor about his enterprises. "I figure that if we're going to go out of business, we might as well go out making a lot of noise," he says.