A wonderful orchard outside Charlottesville, Vintage Virginia Apples, is hard at work preserving and reintroducing many of the old apple varietals that have been forgotten and left behind. The supermarket maelstrom that left us with perfect-looking red delicious, golden delicious and Granny Smith apples – all bred to last forever – has cost us something. Many of the apple names at Vintage Virginia Apples were unfamiliar – Esopus Spitzenburgh, Calville Blanc d’hiver, Ashmead’s Kernel – but the revelation to me was the explosion of flavor in my mouth, as if I’d never tasted an apple before.
