Sebastopol's Vintage Treasures By Edible Marin & Wine Country

A fresh pick from the fall crop. As summer slides into fall, Sonoma County embraces apple harvest season in all its glory, from the aroma of the ripe pome fruit to the rattle of laden trucks to the myriad varieties beckoning at market stands...

Brooke Hazen founded Gold Ridge Organic Farms in Sebastopol in 2000, on an 88-acre “blank canvas.“ There were no trees on the pastureland that his family purchased. In building the farm from scratch, he homed in on two crops—olives and apples—and emphasized diversification, planting different varieties of both. The olives outnumber the apples in acres occupied, approximately 70 to 17, but he has 13,000 trees of each. Ten percent of his apples are considered heirloom, with over 70 varieties.

Hazen defines heirloom apples, also called antique apples, as follows: The fruit must not be commercially grown on a large scale and “it has to be flat-out old,“ he says, though allows that this is a gray area. (His oldest is the Ananas Reinette, which dates to 1500s France.) Hazen’s third criterion is that the fruit has a history—in his words, “a path that it went on to get to where it is.”...

Hazen devised a novel way to purvey his heirloom table apples, aka dessert apples, or those eaten “fresh out of hand.” He sells roughly 2-pound bags through Whole Foods locations and Petaluma’s FEED Cooperative. Comprising six to nine varieties, Hazen says, “it’s almost like a gift pack that morphs every week because the varieties are constantly transitioning.” The ripe fruit generally journeys from tree to store to consumer within a day or two.

Hazen’s offerings encompass apples that are available early in the season. “I have Strawberry Parfait that ripens in late July,” he says. “By then, people have been eating stored apples or imports for months. So the early varieties are incredibly welcome.” August and September are his “real harvest months,” he adds.