What if wine and cider had a baby?

Wine is made by fermenting grapes or other fruits, although apple and perry wines are distinctive enough to have earned their own categories, cider and perry. But a growing number of producers are blurring the styles by blending grape wines and ciders or fermenting grapes and other fruits together, with remarkably delicious results.

Some of these producers started out making ciders or wines and expanded. Some bottles are collaborations between wine and cider specialists, but most who make these blends are natural winemakers, who tend to be more experimental and adventurous and less bound by industry and market conventions.

Andy Brennan, from the excellent Aaron Burr Cider in Wurtsboro, NY, makes a wonderfully refreshing blend he calls Appinette by fermenting farmed apples and traminette, a hybrid wine grape, together.

Scar of the sea, a fine wine producer in San Luis Obispo, California, blends a different grape with Newtown Pippin apples each year: gamay in 2021 and palomino in ’22. They were all wonderfully thirst-quenching, something that makes you want to keep drinking, the gamay mix with the taste of tart red fruit and the palomino of apples and orange peel.

In Girona, in the Catalonia region of northeastern Spain, Serpsa natural cider producer, collaborates with Finca Parera, a natural winemaker in the Penedès. The result, Lo Temps es Breu, is a blend of xarello grapes with Crimson Crisp apples, a clear, beautifully balanced drink.

“If we want to talk about terroir and what grows in a place, why aren’t we talking about this?” said Deirdre Heekin, from La Garagista in Barnard, Vt., who, in addition to the extraordinary wines she makes with hybrid grapes, has been making these blends since 2010. “Wine is wine, it’s not just grapes. It can be anything.”

These mixtures, often called co-fermentations, were a natural leap for Ms. Heekin, who, along with her husband, Caleb Barber, grows wine grapes, apples and vegetables the old-fashioned, subsistence farm style. Such a diversity of products offers options depending on what the year offers you.

“It’s an old-fashioned agricultural hedge,” she said. “If you have frost and it affects grapes, but you have apples, you adapt. From a climate change perspective, it is becoming increasingly important and interesting to have that as an option.”

When Mikey Giugni started his Scar of the Sea label in 2012, he wanted to make a red and a white wine, but he had no white grapes. However, he had access to apples and thought he would make a cider, which he had heard about a few years earlier while working with sparkling wine producers in Tasmania.

“One of the producers made really great cider, and I found there wasn’t much difference between great cider and wine,” says Mr. Giugni, who runs the winery with his wife, Gina. “I was a bit naive; Making a good vintage cider is difficult. You don’t always have all the elements to make a balanced drink, acidity, depth, tannins.”

It is also a stylistic hedge. Winemakers have often blended different grapes, selecting one to emphasize acidity, others for color, tannins or brightness. Cider makers do the same with different types of apples. Making 100 percent varietal wines, such as those traditionally made in Burgundy, is much more difficult. Why not mix apples with grapes?

“The flavor components are already complementary,” Mr. Giugni said.

Mr. Brennan, of Aaron Burr Cidery, adds an ideological rationale to the economic and aesthetic rationale for Appinette, his apple-grape blend. He specializes in using apples picked from wild trees to make what he calls “location ciders,” which are intended to convey the nuances of the different places where the apples were collected.

Because wild fruit is not reliably available every year, he uses farmed apples and grapes for Appinette, which he can rely on for sales. “The main reason I’m adding grapes is because I believe cultured ciders need something different,” he said in an email. “Cider is about the life of the tree, and most orchards don’t give them much life.”

Many grape-apple blends are light and airy, the kind of drinks that are easy to drink, what the natural wine people call “glou-glou,” the French term for what might be “glug-glug” in English. That is Mr. Giugni’s goal.

“It’s a beer alternative,” he said. “It’s easier than wine throughout the day, and you can drink more of it.” The usual alcohol content is generally 7 to 10 percent, which, along with the autumnal character of cider fruit, makes these wines perfect choices for Thanksgiving.

But Ms. Heekin doesn’t want to limit the perception of how good these grape-fruit co-fermentations can be. “It broadens our horizons in a creative and sustainable way,” said Ms Heekin.

You just have to taste La Garagista’s Stolen Roses 2021, a sparkling rosé in which the cider is fermented on red wine pulp, in tribute, she said, to vin ed poman ancestral style of cider made in a similar manner in the Alpine region of Italy.

It has depth, flavor and flavor – refreshing, yes, but also complex with a salty edge. And it will age and evolve.

To make Stolen Roses, Mrs. Heekin uses many different varieties of wild and cultivated apples from her land. The new apple crop is blended with older ciders, a method she said is used by traditional Vermont cider makers, who drink a barrel of cider over the course of a year and then simply add the new cider to the apple after the next harvest. whatever was left. Over time, this creates ciders of great complexity, somewhat similar to the solera method used by sherry producers.

Ms. Heekin compared it to Cucina Povera, the tradition of Italian peasant cooking, where you did the best you could with whatever ingredients you could find. “It is becoming increasingly difficult for small producers to keep their heads above water. People have to be smart and clever in what they do. I think it will continue to grow given where we are on climate change.”

La Garagista passes these skills on to younger farmers and producers. With the mentorship of Ms. Heekin and Mr. Barber, they train at La Garagista and also pursue their own projects.

Camila Carrillo, who has been working at La Garagista for several years, also makes great wines and blends under her own label. La Montañuela. She calls her 2021 Florecita Rockera cuvée a sparkling grape cider pétillant naturel. It consists of 90 percent apples, mainly Macoun, and 10 percent grapes, petite pearl and verona, largely fermented separately and then blended together.

The alcohol content is slightly higher than most, at 11 percent, but it has bright, complex aromas and is dry, refreshing and spicy. Her ’21 Los Enamorados is a mix of wild and cultivated apples in which wineskins were soaked after fermentation. I tasted it last summer before it hit the market and found it fresh, strong and a bit smoky.

Willa Deeley, who appreciated Heekin/Barber’s guidance so much that she called her label Disciple, makes ciders that are occasionally blended with grapes, such as its tart, fresh and invigorating Stella d’Oro. But more often she just uses other fruits, such as plums and peaches. Her Semiprecious is a delicious, refreshing mix of apples and plums.

Almost all of these mixtures are of extremely small production, often as experimental as they are commercial. You won’t find them in the supermarket. But they are popping up here and there with greater frequency.

Hudson Chatham Winery in Ghent, NY, makes a rosé from apples fermented with chelois grapes. So does Rose Hill Farm in Red Hook, NY Meinklang in Austria mixes apples with grüner veltliner. Koppitschalso in Austria, mixes blaufränkisch and syrah with cherries to make a pét-nat. New cellars in Michigan and Hiyu Farm in the Columbia River Gorge region of Oregon, both make co-fermentations, just like that Asanta And Vinca Minor in California.

Keep your eyes open, they are all worth a try.

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