Adam's Apples

Just a few years ago you knew what to expect in the fruit section in winter and spring. There would be Red Delicious , Golden Delicious , and (incongruously) Granny Smith . In the Northeast and maybe elsewhere there would be McIntosh and his kin  Empire  and Cortland . "Newer" stalwarts might include non-native  Gala , Fuji , and Braeburn . In the Northeast you'd also get, fleetingly, the end of the Macouns , if you were lucky. It was the same every year. Things have changed. The stalwarts are still there, but this week the shelves at my local supermarket were dominated by the likes of  Jazz , Pinata , and Cripps Pink . Honeycrisp , like McIntosh, has established itself nearly year round, though like the Mac its best qualities thin over time. Pacific Rose, Pinata, and Sweetango

Large Opal's lively lemon yellow is dialed back just a notch by a drop of orange. Conical and ribbed, she is sparsely decorated with large brown lenticels and a brown crown of russet. One sports a small spotty patch of pink blush. Unbroken, Opal has a strong aroma of cider and honey and a whiff of spice. Her calyx is only half closed.

Happy new year and thanks to my readers for 2013! King David here came courtesy of a reader. Last year was another dicey apple harvest , with crop damage falling unevenly across and within North America's major apple-growing regions. I continue to be rewarded by the human harvest of personal contact with apple farmers and fanatics of all stripes. A highlight of my year in apples was a walk in Tower Hill's heritage orchard with Richard Borrie of the inestimable Orange Pippin web site. Your comments keep me focused and thinking and are often the source of story ideas .

Season's greetings from Adam's Apples and Arkansas Black.

Professional league apple bobbing? Fruit Quidditch? Nope. Biologically, a sport is a spontaneous mutation that produces offspring with abnormal variation from its parents. Pomologically, there is this added twist. Apples are propagated by grafting, which produces genetically identical trees. An apple sport does not just differ from its two parents, but from itself, or at least its graft antecedent.

What could be better than an opinionated catalog of apple reviews, sometimes blunt, sometimes wrong, never boring? Why, two  such collections, each with a different take. At The Fruit Gardener a blogger named Eric is busy cataloging and rating apples of all kinds. Eric lives a northwest of Albany, New York, and has access to some great varieties.

I wouldn't normally do this. You see, Kiku, at left, is Fuji. It's a minor variant, a genetic mutation called a sport. Heavily marketed Kiku, at left, is really just the brand name for Fuji Kiku Fubrax. A regular Fuji is at right. Sports typically have better color, or ripen earlier, or bear better, or have other qualities that recommend them to growers. Only rarely is there any appreciable difference in flavor, with a unique name to differentiate the sport from the sported. The name is the claim that calls for an apples-to-apples comparison.