How We Bottle Sunshine

Here in New Zealand, we’ve just passed the longest day of the year. The Summer Solstice on December 22nd seemed like just another day in the rush up to Christmas. But for nature and particularly the apple tree, it’s a significant event. Because rather than our calendar year, it’s the actual year that the tree works to. At CoralTree Organics we pay careful attention to these sorts of things. It’s all a part of our dedication to producing the very best Apple Cider Vinegar by harnessing the power of nature.

How an apple tree grows

Leading up to the Summer Solstice the apple tree is putting itself under a lot of stress, frantically growing. All its leaves are out and the flowers are pollinated. There are so many processes happening, building the fruit around the flower, encapsulating the seed that’s inside.

On the longest day of the year, apple trees stop and breathe. The trees stop reproducing cells. The rampant growth of the last couple of months is over and that leafy growth is done. All of the effort is now on expanding the fruit. As the apples become fuller, the fruit ripens. Photosynthesis is converting all that sunshine into sugars and that’s being stored in the flesh of the apple. The tree is starting to store more energy for the next cycle around.

Planet Earth is driven by the sun giving us energy. Perfectly ripe fruit are the encapsulation of sunshine. When the fruit is at its best, the apples are easy to pick, filled with vim, vigour and nutrition, ready for us to eat. Here at CoralTree, everything we do is focussed on trying to capture as much of those vital qualities as we can. And that determines every step of our organic apple cider vinegar manufacturing.

How we get all that goodness into a bottle

We keep things as simple and natural as possible. The tree starts off in the very simple form and brings the flowers into fruit. The ripening fruit convert sunshine through photosynthesis into sugars. The apples are pressed into a sweet apple juice and we don’t do anything else to it. Unfiltered, unpasteurised, unmessed with – we don’t add anything else. We simply enable that sweetness to be converted through the natural process of fermentation. Juice goes through an alcoholic stage and is converted by living bacteria into acetic acid.

CoralTree Organics store this vinegar in oak barrels to mature it, like a fine wine. This maturation process helps to develop the flavour making a premium drinking vinegar – a health tonic, a condiment, a little burst of sunshine.

We use locally-grown fruit and press those apples in sunny Otaki, New Zealand. Our glass bottles contain the liquid sunshine and nutrients of hundreds of apples.

All the happiness of the season to you from all of us here at CoralTree.