How the House Starts

I have been quaffing sparkling wine (Cava, Crémant, Franciacorta, Champagne) and making sparkling wine and cider for a good amount of time, but all of my experience has just provided "free" drinks to me and family up until this point. I want to lead with that, not bury it. Ebullient is going to be a sparkling house, a place that takes the discipline of bottle-fermented sparkling and applies it to whatever fruit the land can sustain. Wine and cider, both. On the same limestone. In the same cellar. By the same hands.

The orchard side has its own rigor, and it is deeper than most American cider operations are willing to commit to. Most "hard cider" in this country is made from juice concentrate or culinary apples, sweetened, force-carbonated, shipped in 4-packs. That is honorable work. It is not what we are doing.

The orchard as a blending system

The orchard at Ebullient is being planted the way a serious winery plants its vineyard, as a blending system, not a monoculture. Each variety has a role, and a cider made from any one of them alone is incomplete. A cider blended from all of them is structured the way Champagne is structured, high-acid base, complex middle, persistent finish.

• GoldRush, acid and longevity. The bones.
• Dabinett and Yarlington Mill, tannic structure. The English bittersweet tradition. This is what gives a serious cider its grip.
• Harrison and Franklin, American heritage cider apples. Pre-Prohibition varieties that almost disappeared and are slowly coming back. A nod to the country's actual cider history, which was once enormous and is now mostly forgotten.
• Stayman, Grimes, and Golden Delicious, balance and aromatic lift. Local, familiar, true to this place.

Every American cider that aspires to be taken seriously is, eventually, a blending decision. We are starting there rather than ending there.

The press question

In the cellar, every piece of equipment is a style decision, and we rejected hammer mills. They are fast, that is their only virtue. They over-pulverize fruit, risk damaging the seeds (which release harsh phenolics into the must), and reduce press-fraction control to almost nothing. For this house, the crusher and the press are not efficiency decisions; they are style decisions.

Two methods, on the same fruit

We will release cider in two distinct sparkling methods, both bottle-fermented:

Méthode ancestrale, also called pét-nat. A single fermentation, finished in the bottle. Undisgorged, slightly hazy, alive. It is the older sparkling method historically, and it is what the fruit speaks most honestly through. This will most likely be our first release. It comes online faster than the traditional method and lets the orchard show its character while the traditional-method bottles are still aging on their lees.

Méthode traditionnelle, the Champagne method. A base cider made carefully, then a second fermentation triggered in the bottle by tirage, long aging on lees, riddling, hand-disgorgement, low or zero dosage. The path that takes the longest and rewards the patience.

Different products, same orchard, same discipline.

What we are not making

I want to be specific about what this is not. We are not making sweet cider. We are not making commodity hard cider. We are not making a seasonal farm beverage to sell in 4-packs at the apple festival. Those are honorable products and there is a market for each, they just are not what we are doing here.

We are building an American sparkling cider program that treats apples with the seriousness of wine grapes. The goal is structured, dry, age-worthy sparkling sidra made with Champagne-level discipline and rooted in Missouri limestone.

This is how the house starts.

More to come.