Darraweit Valley Cider’s owners’ tree change to grow heritage cider apples

Marc Serafino and Jenny Abalos turned Marc’s cider-making hobby into their Darraweit Valley Cider business. This is why they planted more than 2000 apple trees to do it.

Tree change: Marc and Jenny in their orchard at Darraweit Guim. Picture: Zoe Phillips

MARC Serafino says he is not quite sure when making cider turned from simply being a hobby into a business.

Marc and his partner Jenny Abalos run Darraweit Valley Cider, a small batch cider house on 17ha at Darraweit Guim in the Macedon Ranges.

They moved there from Altona Meadows in 2014, so they could grow their own cider apples, which Marc says he’d had difficulty sourcing.

“Jenny and I have spoken many times about when it became this big, and we can’t quite pick the time,” Marc says.

“I do remember saying to her once, ‘I want to plant a couple of trees’, because you soon realise you need cider varieties to make good cider … it’s a bit like an eating grape versus a wine grape.

“When you realise that, you then want to plant a couple of trees — this was still at a hobby stage at this point. Then I said 10 trees. Then I remember saying, let’s move to the country so I can plant 30 trees.

“We’ve now got 2500 trees and it’s a business. Not sure when that happened.”

Marc and Jenny produced their first commercial batch of cider two years ago. So far this year they have made about 25,000 litres.

They currently have four varieties: hopped apple (using citra hops), apple and pear, French oaked apple, and a special winter release of dark molasses and espresso.

Marc — who spent part of his childhood in Cornwall, England’s “cider country” — has been experimenting and brewing his own cider for years.

When he decided he needed to mix cider varieties with regular apples, the former chef — who has been teaching the next generation of chefs for about 12 years — started buying cider fruit from Strzelecki Heritage Apples.

Picture: Zoe Phillips

But quantity became an issue. “In recent times I’ve seen some people selling some cider fruit, but not back then,” Marc says.

“It’s pretty impossible to buy commercial quantities of cider fruit. Anyone who is growing them is making cider from them.

“So you come to this impasse of you need the fruit, you can’t buy it, so the only logical conclusion is to start planting it, which is what we did.”

Since moving to the property six years ago, Marc says they have developed about 8ha of it and planted about 2300 trees, which now range from one to five years old.

Jenny says their friends were able to volunteer for extra manpower when it came to planting.

“Every year we planted a little more,” Jenny says. “But it has literally been our city family and friends, with no horticultural background, coming in their brand new gumboots and 4WDs and getting in there and getting their hands dirty.”

The trees yielded 8-9 tonnes of fruit last season, which Marc says they are hoping to double next harvest and eventually build up to 30-40 tonnes.

There are six English and French heritage cider apple varieties — kingston black, improved foxwhelp, bulmer’s norman, michelin, yarlington mill, and browns.

These are blended with pink lady apples — “You don’t need to have all cider fruit in your cider, but you do need a significant portion,” Marc says — sourced from Officer’s Bellevue Orchard, while pears for the apple and pear cider comes from Apteds Orchards in Arthurs Creek.

Marc says the hopped apple cider immediately struck a chord with friends who road-tested it at the cider parties they used to hold.

Since being turned into one of the business’s varieties, it “seems to have become the flagship”.

Fresh look: Jenny and Marc with the cider varieties they sell Three of them are now available in cans. Picture: Zoe Phillips

“What we seem to be doing is breaking into the craft beer-drinking psyche as well, which traditionally has been a hard crossover to go from a beer drinker to cider,” Marc says.

“But because hops is such a beer flavour, they understand this cider very well.

“I’m a beer drinker as well, and I tend to come at making cider from a beer drinker’s perspective, which is, I don’t want it fruity, I don’t want it sweet.

“So we are making styles that are not dry-dry, but mid-range between dry and sweet that have got flavours like hops and oak and these kind of classic beer flavours in them as well.”

He describes the French oak and espresso ciders as good for food pairings as “they’re the deeper flavours”.

“Being a chef by trade, I’ve always got my mind on food matching and I guess that inspires my cider journey to a large extent,” Marc says.

“It is also great to have a couple of easy-drinking styles for sitting in the park on a summer’s day, and those other two [hopped apple and apple and pear] are definitely the lighter drinking.”

Darraweit Valley Cider is run by a team of five, including Marc and Jenny, while their friends and neighbours, the Addicott family, can often be found working in the orchard.

Visitors can enjoy tastings and takeaways from the cellar door, but the couple have plans to develop an outdoor space, including converting a wheat silo into a bar. Their products are available online and at select outlets in regional and metropolitan Victoria, and they also attend farmers markets.

Darraweit Valley Cider’s new logo and branding was released last Friday, while the ciders — except the espresso — have just been released in cans.

“The trend with drinks has gone to cans,” Jenny says.

And Marc is already playing around with new ideas, including experimenting with different hops varieties.

Then there is this possibility for next year’s winter release — a rhubarb sour cider. “I used to love cooking with rhubarb as a chef, so I think it would make a wonderful, tart-sour cider,” he says.

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