Orchard Gate is the written record of what happens to the apples from one family plot north of Vilnius, from the tree to the glass, kept so that each autumn can learn something from the one before it.

The plot sits in one of the old garden communities north of Vilnius, the kind laid out decades ago in narrow strips with a small wooden house at the top of each one and a gate that has not closed properly since before I was born. My grandparents planted most of the trees. There are eleven of them now that still crop: five Antonovkas, two Lithuanian Pepins, one striped autumn apple, a Popierinis that is finished before anyone else has started, and two old trees at the bottom that nobody can name.

I began pressing in 2020, the autumn when nobody was travelling anywhere and the apples were going to rot in the grass if somebody did not deal with them. The first year was juice. The second year some of that juice was left to its own devices in the cellar and turned into cider, and the log started because I could not remember afterwards what I had done to the batch that tasted good. Everything here comes from that notebook, which lives on a shelf above the carboys.

Nothing from the plot is sold and nothing ever will be. The cider is drunk at the plot, given to the neighbours who help on the pressing weekend, and occasionally carried into town in a rucksack. I am not trained in any of this, the log is not instruction, and I do not name the neighbours, the relative who lends the press or the shops where anything was bought. Where I am unsure about a variety or a reason, the log says so.