Heirloom Apple Tasting

Something about the cold air, the dark house each morning of last week made me more fully realize it's October. With the leaves dying off I decided to attend an heirloom apple tasting in Nebraska City over the weekend.

Evidently the United States once harvested an estimated 15,000 apple varieties. These days your local grocer sports maybe 10 varieties (Granny Smith, Red-Delicious, Braeburn, etc) in their produce section. The heirloom varieties have been nearly wiped out of the marketplace except in these niche orchards scattered around the country and populated each October by apple addicts like myself, I suppose.

I selected the Arbor Day Foundation's Preservation Orchard as my weekend destination. It has a limited harvest of 165 different heirloom apple varieties. The orchard was rather picked-over by the time we arrived on Saturday, but we had the good fortune to sample three different varieties. Each one had a distinctively delicious personality that made the cold air, the dark house of each fall morning a little more inviting.