As a burgeoning apple nerd, I was fascinated to learn which ones he had—especially the Spanish apples. Alas, Bleakley is not a nerd.

“I don’t know, there’s 40 of them out there," he shrugged. "I couldn’t tell you which one’s which. Almost half of the orchard is grafted to 10 or fift15en French and Spanish types.”

One of the sources was Guillaume Drouin, whose family has been making cider and Calvados since 1960 in Normandy. “He gave me some and told me the names," Bleakley said. "I have it written down…somewhere.”

To understand Bleakley’s approach to cider, you have to understand the way a farmer thinks. Modern cider makers are often very focused on the apple varieties they can source. They carefully cultivate blends of specific varieties for a wine-like product. Many even follow the practice of making single-varietal ciders like winemakers do. But this wasn’t the approach of the old 17th-century farmers. They planted crops and worked with those that thrived. Apple orchards may have been planted by seed, not graft, and the juice came from blends of dozens of different varieties. That’s still the practice in Europe, where a single cider may have the juice of dozens of different apple varieties. Globalism and monoculture allows us to compose our cuisine of extremely precise ingredients—Madagascar vanilla, Wisconsin corn, Copper River Salmon—but the farmer worked with what he had at hand.