We were driving the back roads near Frelighsburg in the Jeep. The orchards there do not stop — rows of apple trees up the hills and over them, and the houses without orchards have three or four apple trees in the yard anyway, the way other houses have a hedge. I said to my partner there could not possibly be apples in the grocery store in a town like this. Who would buy them? Only the tourists.
We were a week or so early for the bloom. The trees were still holding, buds shut, the valley waiting on a signal it had not been given. It did not make the place less itself. An orchard town in the days before it performs is going about its actual life, which is mostly the part no one drives out to see.
We stayed at a vineyard and cider house called Clos Saragnat, the RV parked in one of its fields. The man who built it is one of the people Quebec wine and cider grew out of. He made the first ice cider in the world — he took the one thing this climate has too much of, the cold, and made it the reason the drink exists at all. He came to this hillside in his later years and made it the place he would do the rest of that work. A young couple bought it last summer. The bottles I carried home have their new mark on them; a tasting room is being redone, a terrace going in. The knowledge carries over untouched. The rest, in time, will look like them.
The philosophy of the place is that nature solves its own problems, given the right choices and enough patience. The fruit was chosen to resist disease on its own, so no one is out spraying it or rescuing it. That does not mean little work. It means the work is the part that matters — the pruning, the harvest, the long chemistry of turning fruit into cider and wine — and none of it is wasted fighting trouble that good choices prevented.
A practice that lives in only one person leaves when he does. Written down, taught, handed to people who came looking for it on purpose, it stays. The young couple did not inherit a farm. They went and found the hardest version of this life and bought their way into it, and the knowledge survives because someone wanted it enough to carry it.
The logo will change. The craft will not.
A few kilometres from the Clos, there is a restaurant at the heart of the village. Good food, good people, and vintage salt and pepper shakers everywhere — windmills, a pair of clementines, two halves of a sandwich, squirrels, and every other small thing someone thought to make into a pair — on every table and every surface.
I cannot eat gluten. Seriously cannot. My partner had found bread I liked there, and when he went back for more he asked whether there was anything I could have for dessert. There was a brownie! I love dark chocolate, the real kind, bitter enough to mean it, and he knows it. I kept my expectations low all the same. "Gluten-free" and "worth eating" are words that do not often travel together.
We went back that evening for it — and for cheesecake meant for the next day, cut early for my partner, not quite set yet. Hard rain. The power out across the village — but the restaurant had it, and the hockey playoffs were on, so it seemed the whole village was inside. Every table full. The bar full. We drove back to the RV through a dark with nothing in it — no road light, no lit window in the distance, no moon, no stars, only the field and the rain and the frogs going at full volume. Then inside: the lights, the game, the desserts. Nanouk on her cushion, hoping for a bite of the cheesecake. The three of us dry. I felt lucky, that night. And I was.
I started the next morning looking over the field. The rain had stopped. The ground was steaming the way it sometimes does the morning after rain. A strong coffee in one hand and the rest of the brownie in the other — dark and dense and barely sweet. I have had my share of bad gluten-free brownies. This was not that. This was sumptuous.
We left before the trees bloomed. I did not mind. I will be back when the apples are ready.
I will even buy some.
— Catherine