About us
Internationally awarded, family owned, quality not quantity oriented, orchard based, full 100% juice, hand crafted, environment friendly real cider makers.
Everything from grafting and planting apple trees, taking care of the orchard, harvesting the fruit, pressing the juice, till the ready cider is done by Plūme family: wife Dace and husband Māris. They've gained knowledge while working at well known family cider production farms in Austria (Mostviertel) and France (Normandy) as well as doing lots of experiments using different fermentation technics to get different styles of cider since year 2010. Also fermented beverages like perry, fruit wines and distilled strong spirits are being made.
Located in Ogres novads - literary the centre and the heart of Latvia. Orchard consist mostly of rare and special purpose apple variety trees, not so many perry pear trees and berry bushes and some other fruit. It is surrounded by wild forests which give perfect protection against strong winds. It has very fertile clay soil which is perfect for growing healthy apple trees. The northern weather of Baltics is also quite unique because in summers it has much longer hours of daylight and the temperature change from quite warm in the day and chilly in the night give great contribution to development of strong aromas in fruit.
There is ever growing collection of apple varieties in the orchard: Some rare aromatic dessert apples, several local and world wide known crab apples, new hybrids from national apple breeding programs, tannic chance seedlings found in Latvia and also true English and French bittersweet cider apples. Also few Austrian perry varieties (Mostbirnen) are grafted and grown on local seedling rootstocks.
To make the most character full cider, the best fruit are needed. Since 2015 crops are being harvested also from own orchard and things are getting more exciting ever since. But still (2019) big part of fruit is gained by "apple safari" - driving around and searching for the best possible seedlings or wild apples - malus sylvestris.
But who is this Mr. Plūme whose hat is on the labels of the drinks?
Mr.Plūme is mythical character living in our orchard. He might be our relative or even brother. Who knows? We've never met him, but we know he is there - we often find bitten bitter apples lying on the ground. We suspect that Mr. Plūme is actually guarding our orchard. We get along really well.
