Four Daughters Winery Loon Juice

The opening sequence of "Penguins of Madagascar: The Movie" features an impressively improbable rescue mission for a wayward penguin egg executed by three of the four Penguins from the richly cast and moderately entertaining "Madagascar" trilogy. The penguins chase the egg down a hill, over the edge of a cliff and finally, onto the deck of an abandoned oil tanker where they manage to save it from the hungry jaws of a trio of leopard seals, launching themselves from the deck by way of a mounted harpoon gun. Riveting stuff to be sure, though there's work to be done in terms of sheer adrenaline-pumping danger and pyrotechnics if DreamWorks wants to join the ranks of the Bond movies or the "Mission Impossible" series. Despite the improbability of the scene, and really, the whole movie in general, it's a nice opening hook. Similarly, Four Daughters Winery's first foray into cider making, Loon Juice, has some nice highlights, especially on the front end. It starts out a bit honey sweet, becomes enjoyably tart, like a crabapple cider, and has a slightly bitter, dry-ish finish that settles out viscid. While a granny smith has a cold, clean, existential tartness, a crabapple's sourness is warmer, softer, fuller, stickier. It doesn't pinch and twist your cheek, and quickly disappear.

The cider is lightly gold, like wheat in late August on the heels of a hot summer or straw left out under the sun too long, and has a vague sparkle that exists briefly at first taste but fades rapidly and is replaced by a sticky mouth feel that gums up the rear roof of you mouth and back of your tongue like a forced apology or a mouthful of Jolly Ranchers. Like those penguins, who reached their peak with their sublime performance in the second "Madagascar" movie, Loon Juice is at its best early on when fresh and cold, before it has coated the back of your throat.

To be fair and honest, a friend brought me this cider all the way from Minnesota and there's no telling what kind of harrowing traveling experience it had rolling around the trunk of his car all of these almost 2,000 summer miles in intermittent air conditioning and wild temperature fluctuations. I do know that there was a camping excursion into 102 degree heat in Madras on the way home, so that might have altered some of the cider's qualities and properties. I mean, pasteurization and an aluminum can can only protect so much.

Even after all of that, on taste alone, it would be hard to tell that Loon Juice isn't made with at least some cider apples. It's the dessert-apple cider closest to a true cider that I've tasted, largely because of that tartness, and possibly because it is a single-varietal cider made with only honeycrisp apples, an apple developed at the University of Minnesota to be sweet, firm, tart, and thus, ideal for eating. Evidently, it's cells are abnormally large and rupture when bitten, thus filling the mouth with juice like Gushers. Furthermore, Four Daughters presses the locally grown apples themselves unlike most commercial operations where apple juice concentrate, frequently made in China and high in sugar, is the base of choice. The apples they use are grown about 25 miles outside of Spring Valley, Minnesota where the winery is located, in the deep south of the state and the resulting cider has a mere seven grams of sugar per serving while sitting at 6% alcohol - they reduce the alcohol by back-sweetening down from 8%.

Four Daughters appears to have gotten into cider on a bit of a whim around a year ago when their head winemaker started recognizing some shared properties between winemaking and cider pressing. Similar to his philosophy on winemaking, he sought to minimize the ingredient list and stay true to the fruit. An honorable goal and pretty successfully executed though it would've been nice if they could've tracked down some cider apples. Perhaps there aren't any available in Minnesota where they are based, though with an 11,000 square foot cidery being built on the property, they might want to start looking for some cider apple farmers or plant some of their own.

In the end, much like the penguins of "Madagascar", this cider is good but best enjoyed in a supporting role, perhaps even just a cameo appearance.

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For more information on Four Daughters Winery you can visit the website, though it has nothing on Loon Juice: http://www.fourdaughtersvineyard.com/

Follow Loon Juice on Twitter: https://twitter.com/loonjuicecider