It is three hundred kilometres north from the Granny Smith apple orchards at the mouth of the Okanagan at Brewster, Washington, to the valley’s last orchard, above Swan Lake, north of Vernon, British Columbia. Brewster has four extra frost-free weeks spring and fall than does Vernon. It lies eight weeks further south, as far as apples are concerned. Brewster’s Royal Gala apples ripen in the hot days of early September. Vernon’s ripen in the cool weeks of late October.  And then there’s the winesap.

An Winter Keeper from the Eighteenth Century

And a darned fine cider apple, too. Goes sweet with a good dose of frost.

To put it yet another way, the earliest apples can ripen in late June in Brewster and the latest in late November, when the nights are finally cool. Further north in Vernon, in late October, many apples that are mid-season fruits in Brewster, grow as  solid, long-keeping late-season apples. Later varieties, from the Pink Ladies of  Brewster to the Galas of Vernon, can keep well into the winter. Many varieties can keep through until June. It should, in other words, be possible to have prime valley apples, without refrigeration, for about eleven and a half months a year. In those two weeks, we can drink cider.

Cider Label from Virginia

Not valley cider, but only because we tore all our winesaps out in the big marketing adjustments of the 1970s, when Red Delicious had become the potato of all apple varieties and people got, well, bored, really.

And instead of working together to ensure that each part of the valley grows what it grows best, what do we do? We all grow Royal Galas, which compete across the border, in a kind of currency trading set by industrial economies back east.

Really, it’s not in our best interest.

Tomorrow: Glimmers of light in the cider industry.