Sink your teeth into an heirloom apple this fall and take a bite of history.

Heirlooms – some call them antiques – are directly related to ones apple-lovers plucked off trees hundreds of years ago in their backyards or just down the road, when there were literally millions of orchards from Maine to the Midwest and “locally grown” wasn’t a label, but a way of life.

These apples fall under many names. Some sound aristocratic – Duchess of Oldenburg or Belle de Boskoop. Some name their colors – Cox’s Orange Pippin, Golden Transparent, Black Oxford. Others sound delectable as that unmistakable “ker-chhuunnk” you get breaking an apple’s skin into flavor. Honeycrisp. Pound Sweet. There’s one heirloom, Charette, nicknamed The Donut Apple (for the shape of its slices, not its taste) and a couple on first-name basis only, like someone you might meet at a bean supper over a brimming wedge of pie. Sutton. Kavanagh. Judy.

John Bunker is someone you might meet at that supper, and he’s a man who knows his apples. A board president of MOFGA or the Maine Organic Farmers ands Gardeners Association, Bunker describes himself as an agricultural historian and “fruit explorer” trying to track down all 150 varieties of seedlings named in Maine. He had scores of finds on hand at last weekend’s Common Ground Fair in Unity.

“Virtually everyone in Maine used to live on or near a farm,” Bunker says, “and they needed orchards. For cider, sweet and hard. For vinegar, as a preservative, and to feed their animals. Think of a time when there were no big grocery stores, no interstate commerce, and snow was on the ground. The apples you could eat then really were the keepers.”

Heirlooms are the chosen keepers. They’re the ones our ancestors named and tried to propagate because they ripened early, cooked well, stayed rock-hard in the root cellar, or just tasted sweet as memory on the tongue. “A named seedling becomes a variety,” Bunker explains. But because each apple seed is genetically unique, you can’t just put one in the ground to replicate fruit.

For that, you need a scion, a cutting maybe 11/2inches long, taken from the parent tree and grafted onto rootstock to preserve traits you’re after. It’s possible to graft multiple varieties on a single tree; some trees surrounding Bunker’s farm in Palermo bear 10 or 15 rare varieties each.

Taste-test some heirlooms this apple season and see if one makes you wild enough to bypass all those mass-produced pretty faces shipped long-distance to the supermarket.

Drive to a local orchard, such as Rollins in Garland, and meet the man who grows them. Ernest Rollins is a seventh-generation farmer tending 25 acres his family has accumulated since 1821. And though the original orchard is now a cow pasture, Rollins continues to offer 40 varieties, including his own favorite heirloom, Bailey Sweets, a red-speckled antique that turns soft fast and makes porcupines gluttons. Rows of century-old Wolf River trees stand laden with huge fruit that dries and bakes into succulence; an old gentleman waits patiently on his cane for antique crab apples to be sorted for jelly. A Golden Russet on a five-acre block his grandfather bought in 1927 and “planted who knows when” is still producing- on exactly one limb – what many call “the champagne of cider apples.” Their unpasteurized cider, made from a secret family recipe, is Rollins says, “almost an heirloom itself.”

He mentions the couple who buys every Hurlbert, a greenish winter apple that keeps without refrigeration, while opening the door under the apple barn to what he calls “the biggest refrigerator in Garland.” Apples store best, he says, in a space just above freezing (theirs stays at 36-38 degrees), with high humidity. He cautions against switching apple environments (“don’t take them in and out of the refrigerator”) to preserve flavor.

That flavor’s character is what their customers travel through winter for, until the apples are gone. Cultivating such taste for heirlooms is one way to keep them around. The little High-Top Sweets he eats three or four at a time in August are already past, but Maiden’s Blush, that good green cooking apple, is still on the tree. “Every heirloom,” Rollins says, “is unique. Who wants to eat the same apple every day?”

Bailey’s Orchard

North Hunts Meadow Road, Whitefield

549-7680

Olmsted’s Orchards

Route 15, Charleston

285-3426

Rollins Orchards

Route 94, Garland

924-3504

Sandy River Orchards

West Sandy River Road, Mercer

587-2563

The Apple Farm

104 Back Road, Fairfield

1-877-453-7656