Their operation is based in a two-story barn on a stunning heritage hilltop farm. Fall sunshine blazes down on a long feed tray full of wet, glistening apples, at the tail end of which Jenn scoops up washed and culled fruit and dumps it into an electric masher. When the bucket below the masher fills, she and Cein dump the contents into the apple press—a Slovenian invention, Bleecker says—a large cylinder with slits in its outside walls and a large water bladder at its center. The pulp is dumped between the bladder and the wall, then the bladder gets filled with a hose, pressing the juice from the pulp and causing it to flow out through the slits, rippling down the sides “like the intro to the movie, The Matrix,” Bleecker says, “where all the green numbers and things are trickling down.” The juice then flows through tubing into a larger drum.

Apple orchards take a long time to grow, Bleecker says, and while they planted apple trees when they started the business, in the meantime, their production has been supplied mainly by foraged apples, he says, “and we started telling stories about each of our bottles… [For example] apples of unknown origin from the Green Mountain National Forest. We found a cornucopia of wild and uncultivated apples late in the season and this is what they gave us.”

They call their ciders “location-based,” meaning they are made from single orchards or areas. “We're hyper-focused on creating something that is, you know, very representative of its terroir,” Bleecker says, “of wherever we got the apples. Because we've discovered that people really love that.” Like their popular Enter the Sandgate cider made only from apples found in Sandgate. “Sandgate people buy the hell outta that stuff,” he says, “because they're like, ‘These are the trees I drive by every single day.’ In fact, some of the people are like, ‘Some of my trees, some of my apples even made it in there,’ you know?”

Cider has been made on Cein’s family farm (a mile from the Wheeler Farm) for over 200 years. And, since the trees are all planted from seed (instead of by grafting, which is akin to cloning, in that it aims to create identical, predictable apple varieties), Bleecker explains, “[Cein's] orchard consists of apples that literally do not exist anywhere else in the world, because they are grown from seed… So when it comes to a truly authentic family heirloom – you know, Vermont heritage cider – it is as authentic as it gets.”

Watson Wheeler’s authenticity is reflected in the unusual names they come up with for their cider vintages. “We come up with some pretty silly names,” Bleecker says. Like: Wildman – a foraged blend from the mysterious and forgotten areas in and around the foothills of Glastenbury; or The Bennington Triangle – made from apples in an area that has a mysterious history of people going missing. But there are others, like Fireside Frost – from apples around Bennington Country, the land of Robert Frost, or The Four Winds – a wickedly delicious cider sourced from the heirloom apples on Cein’s 10-generation farm and aged in oak casks. “You get a lot of time to stand around thinking of names when you're sorting apples,” Bleecker jokes.

“We could make a lot more cider with a lot less effort, if we had, and we will one day have, thousands of our own apple trees… We do want to grow the business, but we never want to stop doing what you're looking at us do right now. Because, you know, once we're not hands on, it just becomes sort of, we just own it. We're not partaking in it. So it'll be interesting to see what happens when our own orchards start to produce and we need to, you know, prune them or harvest them. I like to think that we'll hire people to do that part of the job, but the founders of the company will still get to do the fun part, which is to go exploring and driving around and making these small batches of unique, location-based ciders. Because that really has distinguished us as a cidery from other places.”