More quick bites

Do you miss the harvest? Have some reading. 

Drink your fruit: Winesap Cider

Stormalong, the Massachusetts cider maker, names each in its Rare Apple Series after one of the apples used to make the drink.

My idea to photograph the named apple with the cider is more playful than anything else, especially since most of these are blends of perhaps a half dozen different varieties.

Today's beverage, however, is a single varietal, one hundred percent Stayman Winesap. And that is a Stayman posing with the family group. 

Let's quaff.

The lab and the orchard

Genetic analyses get cheaper and more powerful every year, busting myths and providing information about the lineage of apple cultivars.

Honeycrisp, to cite a notorious example, is not a Macoun x Honeygold cross, as breeding records from the 1960s suggested.

It is rather Keepsake x MN1627 (the latter an uncommercialized variety that has not survived).