Cider apple
Errezil
A celebrated Basque russet reinette from the village of Errezil, primarily an eating and cooking apple with a protected reputation, and used in cider where the crop allows.
Also written Reineta de Errezil, Errezil Sagarra, Erreximela.
- Classification
- Semi-acid — Asturian technological blocks
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Aroma, Acid lift
- Origin
- Errezil, Gipuzkoa, Basque Country
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
How it is classified
Asturian technological blocks
Semi-acid · Semiácido
Intermediate acidity with low phenolics. Together with the acid block this is where most admitted fruit sits.
The Consejo Regulador publishes a technological block only for varieties DOP Sidra de Asturias admits, and this fruit is not among them. The block here is CiderHQ reading descriptive sources against the Asturian definitions rather than a published characterisation, and is the weaker statement of the two.
Every classification on CiderHQ names its system. Why there is more than one.
What it contributes to a blend
A direction, not a measurement. These bands are the level of resolution the evidence supports, and they say which way adding this fruit pushes a blend rather than what the finished cider will be.
| Axis | Typical | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Acid | High | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Pronounced | |
| Body | Medium |
Description as a dual-purpose reinette with pronounced aroma; its role in cider is secondary and less well characterised than its culinary reputation.
A russeted reinette: aromatic, moderately acid, with the dry nutty note that russets carry and enough sugar to be eaten with pleasure.
Aroma
Descriptors associated with this fruit. Each names a character with a known cause, and association is not a promise — what reaches the glass depends on the ferment as much as on the apple.
- Ripe apple — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
- Apple skin — The dry, faintly waxy and slightly bitter aroma of the fruit’s surface rather than its flesh, carried by cuticular waxes, hexyl esters and skin-concentrated phenolics.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Errezil. Figures for this cultivar circulate, but they reach the present through compilation rather than through the original tables, and publishing a number we cannot attribute would give it an authority it has not earned. What is known about how the fruit behaves is described above and below.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Late
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
A keeping apple in the reinette manner, which is why it was valued in a farm household before it was valued in a cider house.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Aromatic and moderately acid
- Little tannin despite the russet
- Better used fresh than after long storage, for cider purposes
How it is used
- Eating and cooking, which is its principal use and the basis of its Basque quality mark
- Cider, where surplus or second-grade fruit goes to the press
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made alone it would give an aromatic, moderately acid cider. It is rarely done, because fruit of this reputation is worth more as fruit than as juice.
About Errezil
Errezil is included here with a qualification: it is not really a cider apple. It is a russeted reinette from a village in the Gipuzkoan uplands, grown for eating and cooking, carrying a Basque quality mark, and sold as fruit rather than as tonnage. Cider gets what the table does not want.
That is a common and under-described route into cider everywhere. A great deal of cider, historically and now, is made partly from fruit that failed to make grade — too small, too marked, too late, surplus to a good year’s demand. The cultivars involved are not cider cultivars and their juice was never selected for a blend, but they are genuinely part of what gets pressed, and a cultivar list that includes only purpose-bred cider fruit misrepresents the tradition.
What it brings when it does reach the press is aroma and moderate acid. It is a useful fruit in that respect, and its russet does not carry the tannin that a naive reading of the skin might suggest — russeting is a cuticle character and says nothing reliable about phenolic content.
Names, origin and identity
Cultivar naming is the hardest problem in cider fruit data. The same tree carries different names across ten miles, and two different trees have shared a name for two centuries.
Origin · traditional account
Firmly associated with the village of Errezil and carrying a Basque quality mark tied to that origin. The tradition is strong; a documented raising is not on record.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Reineta de Regil | Historic spelling | Gipuzkoa. Regil is the Castilian form of the place-name Errezil. |
Why it matters
- One of very few Basque apples with a protected identity of its own, tied to a single village
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Fruit that plays a similar part
Cultivars sharing a classification under the same system and a comparable role in a blend. Not a similarity score — a stated relationship.
Goikoetxe
An aromatic Basque cultivar from Bizkaia, valued for the fruit character it brings to a blend that is otherwise built on acid.
Manttoni
A Basque cultivar of good reputation with balanced acid and pronounced aroma, one of the cultivars a *sagardotegi* will name when describing a serious blend.
Ollo Mouro
A Galician cultivar named for its dark eye, used in the region’s cider and one of the fruits its small revival has taken up.
Repinaldo
A conical Galician apple of long standing, one of the cultivars the region’s small cider revival has built on, and a name shared with fruit elsewhere in Iberia.
Collaos
A late, moderately-cropping Asturian semi-acid cultivar, ripening at the very end of November — later than almost anything else on the permitted list.
De la Riega
A well-regarded Asturian cultivar in the semi-acid block at 4,3 g/L, low in disease and reliable in crop — balanced rather than sweet, despite a mild eating character.
Styles it is characteristic of
Sidra natural
The still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, wild-fermented from local high-acid fruit and poured from a height to raise a momentary sparkle.
Euskal Sagardoa
Basque cider under its own protected designation, made from Basque-grown apples in the *sagardotegi* tradition of barrel service and dry, high-acid, still cider.
Where it grows
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- How does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
- How do you blend cider
- Is boskoop good for cider — It is one of the apples most often recommended for German and Dutch cider, on high acid rather than on tannin. Belle de Boskoop is a large, russeted, long-keeping culinary apple, and its role in a blend is the same as any sharp: acid and a lower pH.
- Where does a ripe apple aroma in cider come from — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
- Why does cider smell of apple skin
- Which basque cider apple gives the most aroma — Goikoetxe, from Bizkaia. Basque orchards are dominated by sharp cultivars that give a blend structure rather than fruit character, so a variety whose aroma survives fermentation is valued out of all proportion to its share of the planting, and is planted deliberately for it.
Where to go next
- How cider apples are classified — Why there are four schemes and none of them is universal.
- The blend explorer — See which way changing the proportions moves a blend.
- Blending — What a cider maker is actually deciding when they build a blend.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
NEIKER Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development
NEIKER · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
Euskal Sagardoa / Sidra Natural del País Vasco protected designation
Eusko Label / Basque Government · designation authority · registered as competent for this subject
Servicio Regional de Investigación y Desarrollo Agroalimentario (SERIDA)
Principado de Asturias · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The Asturian regional agri-food research service, and the technical authority behind the Asturian cultivar classification and the analysis of sidra natural. SERIDA’s own site has not been opened; what CiderHQ has read is SERIDA’s varietal characterisation as republished by the Consejo Regulador of DOP Sidra de Asturias, which credits it explicitly. The Asturian measurements therefore cite the Consejo rather than SERIDA — citing the body that did the work, at a document CiderHQ has not seen, would be exactly the kind of borrowed authority this register exists to prevent.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.