In 1992, Steve Selin was long-haired and twenty, bicycling from Telluride to Albuquerque, coming to the end of a long descent out of the Colorado mountains through the New Mexico desert, when the eastern sky grew dark and began to spit lightning. “Then suddenly, all around me were these gorgeous old apple orchards, and the sun was setting in the west. It was incredibly dramatic, with the sun shining down on me—the most strikingly beautiful day of my life.”

It seems like an omen now, says Steve, owner of South Hill Cider on the fringes of Ithaca. But he would spend the next few decades as a luthier, repairing violins and cellos around the Finger Lakes. By night he was playing old time bluegrass fiddle at festivals and wineries. In between, he was making apple cider, “maybe four barrels a year,” foraging all of his fruit from abandoned orchards and wild hedgerows. Despite degrees in forest biology and soil ecology, his vision of becoming an organic farmer just wasn’t happening. And so this luthier-by-day, fiddler-by-night thing went on for years.

All the while he was fermenting two hundred gallons a year—the max federal law allows a hobbyist—“always focusing on making it as good as possible.”

And then his cider started talking to him.

“I was getting to know the winemakers, tasting a lot of their wines,” he explains recently, “and I started bringing them my ciders. One of them had an interest in cider, so we started doing blind tastings, with the bottles in brown paper bags. And that’s when we realized the cider I was making was very like wine—and better than most of the cider you could buy.”

In 2012 he embarked full time on the career that would make him what he is today: orchardist, apple hunter, and one of New York's most celebrated cider makers.

“You really get that ‘fine wine’ feel to them,” Robert Parker of The Wine Advocate says of Steve’s ciders, “…harmonious and friendly.” The Cider Journal raved a few years ago, “This is a beautiful, well-crafted cider that is wine-like.”

Still slender and ponytailed at fifty-two, you might call Steve Selin an apple whisperer, only it’s the apples—bearing delightfully baroque names like Brown Snout, Chisel Jersey, Kingston Black, Roxbury Russet, Tremlett’s Bitter, and Newtown Pippin—that whisper to him.

All summer long he plucks, slices, chews, savors, and spits out the emerging fruit—much of it sour or bitter on the tongue—monitoring its progress toward harvest. Then, come fall, he marries this variety with that—maybe a Porter’s Perfection with a Golden Russet—to produce elegant, complex, wine-like beverages that expand, even defy, conventional notions of cider.

“Nowadays we turn out about between five thousand and eight thousand cases a year—maybe sixty thousand bottles,” he explains, seated across a table at his cidery’s tasting room at 550 Sandbank Road. Off to his right, wooden barrels and stainless fermenting tanks peek through a ceiling-high glass wall. Bottles labeled “String Theory,” “Bluegrass Russet,” “Sunlight Transformed,” and “Crabseckle” line the shelves.

Sixty thousand bottles a year may sound like a lot, says Steve, “but that’s about a hundred and thirty times smaller than one of the big cideries in the area.” And don’t get him started on beverage manufacturers who call wine coolers “cider” or slap that word onto concoctions of carbonated, fortified apple juice.

“There’s a lot of bad cider out there,” he says, shaking his head. “Ours, well, it’s a different product.”

He hops up from the table and goes over to the long counter where employees are waiting on customers and comes back with three short tasting glasses of cider. One is pale yellow, the color of white wine. Another is light amber. The third is a ruddy amber with some visible fizz.

“In England, France, Spain, Germany—cider is very common,” he explains, “because anywhere you have orchards, cider is part of the cuisine.” Here in this country, following a long love affair with hard cider that fizzled out a century ago, Americans are rediscovering just how good and varied fine ciders can be. And educating the American palate is part of Steve’s mission.

One Flight or Two?

“We’ll start with this one,” he says, and points to the palest cider. It’s dry but with an unmistakable apple presence—crisp, simple, and darned good. “Some apples are made to blend,” he says, “but others, like the Golden Russet and the Baldwin, also make a good single.” The one we just sampled is a single variety Baldwin, “bone dry and bright,” he says, “with zero residual sugar.”

The next, lightly tawny, is a blend of Baldwin and Golden Russet. “This is the one I like to serve to wine drinkers,” he explains, “because it comes across like a white burgundy.” It possesses more depth and a toastier presence than the plain Baldwin. He ferments it “dry,” he says, and lets it rest in neutral French oak barrels before bottling.

The last, a deep and sparkling amber, is a single variety made from the tannic, bittersweet Dabinett apple. “These are the apple varieties used in Calvados”—the apple brandy of Normandy, France—“and at the opposite end of the spectrum” from the “tart, lean, focused Baldwin.”

“The classic cliche is that ‘the wine is made in the vineyard,’” a marriage of soil, weather, and fruit, he says. “It’s the same with cider. If you grow good fruit or find really great varieties in the wild, the cider is almost going to make itself. So our goal is to do as little as possible to it. But you also have to have the right varieties, and know when they’re ready.”

Twelve years of professional experimentation has translated into thirty-five distinctive ciders bearing the South Hill name, ranging in price and complexity from the twelve-dollar “bone dry” Farmhouse label to his fifty-four-dollar champagne-like Cuvee Brut, aged sur lie six years. About half his labels are of the “dry sparkling” variety, with the others still and dry, or medium sweet sparklers, or dessert ciders.

After a tour of the fermentation room, we step outside into the open air dining area where about forty patrons are lunching on cider-marinated pulled pork or Reuben sandwiches (including a beet Reuben), drinking in the splendid views along with flights or whole glasses of cider. Guided tastings, cheese boards, and glass pours are available most hours, and the full menu is served on weekends and starting at 4 p.m. weekdays. Steve’s love of live music means that most evenings there is a band on the outdoor stage (find the schedule at southhillcider.com). Some concerts have a suggested donation, and some require tickets.

Among those seated outdoors are Tom Hasman and Letitia Devoesick of Rochester, here for the first time and sampling flights. They’d come to hike Treman State Park and saw a sign for the cidery. “You can see it went down fast,” Tom says with a laugh. “These are our second flights.”

Off to the left, a few sheep are grazing behind tall deer fences, and Steve points out some of the established apple varieties he’s growing on ten of the cidery’s twenty-six acres, including Calville Blancs of French origin. “A lot of the apples in Monet’s paintings included these,” he says as we head down a gradual slope toward five long, unfenced rows of young trees.

This is Steve’s “experimental” orchard: about one hundred and fifty unfenced trees he’s propagating from wild varieties he’s been testing and using for years. Many are wearing cages around their upper trunks to prevent deer damage.

Some of Steve’s experimental trees are so new they don’t yet have names, but he points with some pride to a row of apples called Dawes Melody that he named “after the property I found it on.”

He plucks a small green apple off one young tree and unsheathes the knife on his belt. He slices into it and pops a piece into his mouth, chewing it thoughtfully before spitting it out. “Mm,” he murmurs. “That’s pure bitterness. Bitter and astringent. But the bitterness is very round.” He cuts off another slice and chews some more. “It’s got a nice aroma and a good amount of sugar to make the alcohol.” He turns to study the row, and nods. “There’s a lot of good fruit there.”

Time and Place in a Glass

Safer to drink than water, hard cider was once a staple of the American diet, the quaff of patrician and everyman alike. In colonial days a typical family consumed seven barrels of cider annually—about thirty-five gallons per person. (Children drank a low-alcohol version called ciderkin.) The Johnny Appleseed you learned about in grammar school was a real person, tin pot hat and all. What your teacher didn’t tell you was that all those orchards John Chapman planted and grafted were for making hard cider—not pie. National cider production plummeted, then collapsed under Prohibition. Temperance zealots even took axes to orchards, and apple growers were forced to start other crops or abandon their orchards.

With cider enjoying a new wave of popularity, artisanal growers like Steve are restoring those orchards, planting new ones, and forever on the hunt for new varieties. “We’re fortunate that there are thousands of [wild] apple trees around here,” he says. “Almost all don’t taste good, but we’re always looking for the ones that surprise you with intense flavor…It could be very tart, or very bitter, or super sweet, but it needs at least one. Or all three.”

With harvest imminent, he decides to visit the apples, and widow, of his late friend Peter Hoover. Her Stone Fence Farm in Trumansburg includes a quarter-acre orchard whose fifty trees supply all the fruit for South Hill’s Stone Fence label.

He snags a plate of cheeses and a half-bottle of something sort of brick red and we climb into his Honda Civic. It’s a twenty-five-minute drive to Trumansburg, and his Spotify is pouring out tunes by the Hudson Valley banjoist and fiddler Bruce Molsky. “Whoa,” he calls out on Perry Road, pointing to a blur on the right. “That crab apple tree is loaded! We’ll have to check it out on the way back.” It’s what apple hunters do.

Hard cider was “not all that popular” in 2012 as he debated whether to jump in full time. But decades of doing “oil changes on other people’s instruments” had grown repetitious, hard on his joints, and lonely. And yet all around the Lakes there was a collaborative community of wine and cider makers whose camaraderie—like those of musicians—he thrived on. He and his wife, Ellyn, had two small boys, but she’s a family doctor “and could pay the bills.”

He took the plunge, but into murky waters. A hard spring frost had burned nearly all the blossoms on the wild trees he’d long been foraging, and none had borne fruit. He’d have to buy. But what? And where?

“That’s when a friend told me that Cornell had a research orchard where they were cultivating [cider] apple varieties from England and France.” He bought a pickup truck’s worth of Tremlett’s Bitter, Dabinetts, and Chisel Jerseys, and then paid a visit to a farmstand orchardist who assured him that the traditional American varieties he sold—Ida Reds, Golden Delicious, Northern Spy—“are what you make cider with.”

Steve took home a truckload of these as well, but, fatefully, decided to ferment the Cornell apples separately from the American. “It was a huge ‘aha’ moment,” he says. “They were drastically different.” The American varieties were ideal for baking and eating but their cider proved “unexceptional.” The European apples, high in tannins and acidity, “had incredible flavors and textures and aromas.”

His next challenge was to start his own orchard. In 2013 he and Ellyn scoured the Lakes region, looking to rent a few acres, but were repeatedly rebuffed. But if that mystically beautiful moment in New Mexico twenty years earlier had indeed been an omen, it was now starting to, well, bear fruit.

He wrote a one-page letter to the owner of twenty-six neglected acres of pasture immediately adjacent to his own—he’d never seen the man—explaining his vision of an organic cidery. Might he lease the property? The owner, Art Hansen, was a retired soils scientist eager to see his land remain in agriculture and, to their astonishment, he offered to sell his farm at a fraction of its market value. “He could tell we were authentic,” says Steve. And when he realized the Selins were “scrambling” to raise the money, Art agreed to hold the loan himself.

Best of all, the farm’s silty loam is high in clay that imparts an essential depth of flavor to cider apples. “But if you go half a mile down the road,” says Steve, shaking his head, “the soil’s terrible.”

We arrive at Stone Fence Farm. Peggy Haine, eighty, emerges from the white clapboard farmhouse and spies the bottle in Steve’s hand. “What have we here?” she asks. “Pommeau,” he announces, and at her kitchen table he pours out small servings from the dome-shouldered bottle. Made from Dabinett apples and apple brandy, it’s as sweet and deeply flavored as an aged port. It goes splendidly with the cheeses.

Peggy’s late husband, Peter, a paleontologist and ethnomusicologist, started this cider orchard in 1993. Steve had known Peter’s recordings of rural folk musicians long before they all met at a local concert in 2002, and they became fast friends. After he and Peggy catch up, we head out to the orchard, where Steve examines the fruit.

He cuts an apple from a variety called Major into slices, and offers one to Peggy. “Good tannins,” she says. He slices into a Kingston Black. Nice acidity, they agree. Steve remarks the fruit has “taken off” in this summer’s high heat and heavy rains. “Harvest might be two weeks early.”

Peggy nods, then mentions she’d love some apples for baking. Steve disappears into the orchard and returns with a dozen Reinette Zabergaus—a nutty, sweet-sharp member of the russet family—in the folds of his shirt. Delighted, Peggy marvels at how the orchard had “started out a bunch of sticks.”

“And now,” she says, “it’s just so beautiful.”

Putting that beauty into bottles will take months. Workers wielding ladders and sticks will harvest those apples, the start of a long process—crushing, fermenting, aging, and bottling—that will transfigure their tannins, tartness, bitterness, sugars, and acids into what Steve’s tasting notes describe as flavors of “starfruit, lychee, and walnut” with “aromas of wet slate.” Dry and still, it’s called Stone Fence.

On the drive home we’re back on Perry Road when Steve crosses the oncoming lane and pulls up to the side of the road in a cloud of dust. “I’m going to check out this crab apple tree,” he explains, striding over to it. He plucks one small, green apple, bites into it, chews it a bit, and spits it.

“Nah. Not ready. But worth coming back for.” He plucks off five more apples and dumps them into the console of his car. He’ll mark them with a felt-tip pen to remind him where and when he got them. Once harvested he’ll use them in his Packbasket label, made entirely of wild seedling apples like these. It’s “the epitome of terroir,” he says. “Time and place in a glass.”