A road trip through Maine in search of America’s rarest apples
Walking past the Galas and Fujis at McDougal Orchards in Springvale, Maine, I slipped past a fence to find the apples I’d come for: Black Oxfords glossy as new shoes, yellow-fleshed Esopus Spitzenburgs and Blue Pearmains stippled with green dots. The orchard’s 16 heirloom varieties, older cultivars passed down by generations of farmers, are fenced to keep out the crowd. Sold only in the farm store, they star at annual tastings that draw aficionados.
“People come looking for their favorite varieties,” said Polly McAdam, 33, a fourth-generation orchardist who grows apples on land her family’s owned since 1779. She handed me a teensy, pink-and-green Lady Apple that looked like a toy and tasted like Smarties. Once, American farmers cultivated many varieties like it. In the mid-19th century, there were more than 15,000 named apple varieties across the country. But by the early 20th century, orchardists were largely transitioning to a handful of more commercially viable fruit.
In recent years, Maine has entered what Todd Little-Siebold, a historian at the College of the Atlantic, calls an “apple renaissance.” Now, each fall, as leaf-peepers flood the state, apple-obsessives also fan out to find oddball specimens that range from rare heirlooms to never-before-tasted seedlings.
“They’ve learned there’s more to apples than McIntosh and Cortlands,” McAdam said.
As an amateur fruit fanatic myself, I’ve long wanted to taste my way through Maine’s apple underground—and, when I heard rumors of a secret, sought-after tree somewhere along the state’s 3,500-mile coastline, my fascination deepened. Poring over road maps, I plotted a south-to-north journey, with stops at orchards and cideries where I hoped to meet the people behind this pomological frenzy.