It's March, and Steve Thomas still is busy tasting and tweaking apple cider in the fragrant back room of his old winery in Madison, Ind. Most cider producers pressed apples and filled jugs with their juice months ago, in October and November. But Thomas is just funneling his pressings into bottles.

That's because his is not ordinary sweet cider. Definitely not the kind for sale at roadside stands in the fall.

His straw-colored Gale's Hard Cider is about 7 percent alcohol. It's the crisp, dry and refreshing type of cider served by pubs in Great Britain - very much unlike the mainstream hard cider sold in American stores.

"I don't want to sound crass about it," says Thomas, the owner of Thomas Family Winery in Madison. "But that's kind of like comparing Budweiser to real beer. Traditional cider is dry."

GALE'S HARD CIDER

• Gale's Hard Cider is $4.99 per bottle and $58 per case. • Thomas Family Winery, 208 E. Second St., Madison, IN 47250; (812) 273-3755; (800) 948-8466; www.thomasfamilywinery.us. • Open: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday-Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. • Celebrate cider and spicy foods during the "Hot Luck and Fiery Foods Exhibition" at Thomas Family Winery April 4 and 5.

Thomas ferments and finishes seyval blanc, riesling, syrah and five other wines in this Ohio River town. But his cider sales are growing faster than any grape varietal.

"It's kind of like plating up food," he says. "But there's still a lot that can go wrong at the bottling stage." Thomas grew up near Indianapolis and is a third-generation wine-maker who studied geology and Spanish at Ball State University. He worked in the oil business before returning to Indiana in 1983 to make wine for his father, a retired physician. The family moved the winery to Madison in 1995, using grapes grown in the Midwest and on the West Coast.

Even before the move to Madison, Thomas began tinkering with hard cider, a beverage revered in Wales, the home of his ancestors. His late grandfather, Gale Thomas, first made cider during Prohibition, on the family farm northeast of Indianapolis.

"It wasn't quite legal," Thomas says, grinning.

He knew his grandfather - a big, square-shouldered man who died in 1980 - but never made cider with him. Never saw his recipe. Doesn't even think he used a recipe.

But he remembers him saying the best hard cider should have a good "snap,'' meaning a dry, tart edge. So Thomas experimented and asked friends to bring him cider samples from visits to Great Britain. By 1995, he was satisfied with the snap in his Celtic-style cider, and introduced Gale's Cider. He sells it by the case, bottle and glass at his rustic, pub-like winery, a former 19th-century carriage house. Gale's is also available at a few bars in Indianapolis and Louisville.

"I think my grandfather would approve," Thomas says.

Begin with excellent apples

Like his grandfather, Thomas knows the best cider begins with the best apples. He uses old heirloom varieties many of us have never heard of - Golden Russet, Sheep Nose, Newtown Pippin, even puckery crab apples - grown in an orchard near Kokomo, in north-central Indiana. Thomas tastes the apples and blends them, striving for the proper balance of flavor, as he presses the juice in the orchard.

He trucks the juice back to Madison, where it ferments in old oak barrels for about a month. Then he lets the cider age another three months in the wood, before transferring it to stainless steel tanks. He filters the cider and adds a little more bitter or sweet juice, if needed.

Finally, he puts his grandfather's namesake cider in clear wine bottles, stoppered with corks, bearing the angry red dragon image of the Welsh flag on the label.

Later this month, a friend of his grandfather's will take Thomas on a tour of an abandoned orchard, where the elder Thomas harvested cider apples decades ago.

"I'm hoping I'll find a few old trees still alive there," Thomas says.

If he does, he'll try to graft new roots on a shoot. And if that shoot someday bears fruit, it would only be fitting for Gale's apples to go into Gale's Hard Cider.

E-mail cmartin@enquirer.com