I took a cider business and marketing class some years ago as I was getting ready to begin licensed production. One of the speakers said to forget about trying both to grow apples and make cider--that to make cider and money (or money and cider) one had to bring juice in from growers rather than spend time in an orchard growing just the right apples you wanted for cider. I think that is correct advice if you want to make money from commercial cider sold in a can. But if you want to make beautiful, elegant cider that derives its identify and flavor from the very apples in it, the only way to go is with apples you grow (unless you have access to small volumes of single variety juice). That a Baldwin is heavily biennial is not a barrier to planting if you otherwise like what it does for your cider. I don't have any experience growing it or using it in cider. I like eating it. And I like making cider from the extraordinary diversity of apples we're lucky to have and given a chance to make cider from some Baldwins, I probably would.
Good cider in bottles keeps and keeps. I'm still selling cider made with apples picked in 2016 and bottled in 2017. And I haven't made any
Pitts' Bitter for two years because the combination of trees (seedlings and Stayman-like late apples) has not aligned correctly. Unless you heavily invest in dwarf trees and hyper-manage an orchard, you're always going to have significant variations in production from tree to tree and year to year, as Karen says. And a blessing as Michael says. It's how the trees tell you they need a break, a respite, a breath, some space. I've an old homestead orchard on Colorado's western slope I'm lucky to forage apples from and at this point in its life I'm
lucky to get a biennial crop and thus feel twice blessed in a year like 2020 when all the stars align and it yields a bumper crop of apples. Next year will certainly be different and I look forward to whatever opportunity the orchards give me.