Fuentes

How it is classified

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.

Severely acid — among the sharpest fruit in the Asturian register — with modest phenolics behind it. Nobody eats this apple.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Fuentes, and for a great deal of cider fruit that is a finding rather than a gap. Bittersweet apples in particular contribute tannin, sugar and body while being close to aromatically mute, and most of what a cider made from them smells of was produced by the fermentation rather than carried in by the fruit. CiderHQ publishes the absence rather than filling the space with descriptors nothing supports.

Put Fuentes into a blend

Measured analysis

Each figure is shown with where and when it was taken. They are not averaged: the same cultivar grown in another climate genuinely gives different numbers, and collapsing them into one would be the most misleading thing this page could do.

Compare within a study to see where these figures sat among the other cultivars the same work analysed — which is a more robust statement than the figures themselves, because absolute values move between laboratories and the ordering inside one study mostly survives.

Watched in the orchard

What named research programmes recorded about this fruit at their own sites. Bloom, harvest and cropping belong to a place and a run of seasons rather than to a cultivar, so they are reported site by site rather than merged.

In the orchard

Harvest window

Very late

Flowering

Pollination group 3

Vigour

Moderate

Cropping

Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate

Keeping

Moderate

The Consejo Regulador records ripening in the second ten days of November (“2ª decena de noviembre”).

Disease and pest susceptibility

Juice and pressing

• Very high acid, and a correspondingly low pH that gives a wild ferment an unusually safe start
• Moderate phenolics by Asturian standards, though low by English or Norman ones
• Moderate sugar: the acid, not the gravity, is what this fruit is for

How it is used

• Acid structure in sidra natural blends
• On the permitted-variety list of the Asturian protected designation

On its own

About Fuentes

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.

Related cultivars

Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.

• Similar role

  De la Riega

  Another Asturian cultivar often miscounted among the sweets; De la Riega is semi-acid, Fuentes firmly acid.

• Similar role

  Meana

  The region’s most phenolic cultivar, and a useful contrast: Meana brings grip where Fuentes brings acid.

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.

• Blanquina

  A pale-skinned Asturian cultivar of high reputation, and — like Raxao, with which it is usually named — an acid-block fruit rather than a semi-acid one.

• Txalaka

  The most widely recognised Basque cider apple: a hard, sharp, late cultivar from Gipuzkoa that supplies much of the acid backbone of *sagardoa*.

• Arbeya

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as acid — 4,81 g/L of acid above the register’s median, with 1,2 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the last ten days of October.

• Carrandona

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as acid — 5,14 g/L of acid above the register’s median, with 1,07 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the second ten days of November.

• Fresnosa

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as acid — 5,0 g/L of acid above the register’s median, with 0,93 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the second ten days of November.

• Josefa

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as acid — 8,51 g/L of acid well above the register’s median, with 0,93 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the second ten days of November.

Where it grows

• Asturias

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
• What is sidra natural — Sidra natural is the still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, bottled without added carbonation and poured from a height to rouse it. It is tart, funky and made to be drunk in small measures poured one at a time.
• What is de la riega — A well-regarded Asturian cultivar in the semi-acid block, published at 4,3 g/L of total acidity and 0,9 g/L of polyphenols — both close to the register’s median, which is what the semi-acid block means rather than a criticism of the fruit. It is reliable in crop and low in disease, which is much of why it is planted.
• What is asturian cider

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.

• 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.

• Denominación de Origen Protegida Sidra de Asturias

  Consejo Regulador de la DOP Sidra de Asturias · designation authority · passage verified 2026-08-24

  The regulating council for Asturian cider. Read on 2026-08-24, and it turned out to carry far more than a permitted-variety list: an agronomic and technological characterisation of each admitted variety, with total acidity, total polyphenols, vigour, flowering, ripening, cropping and susceptibility to fungal disease. The characterisation is credited to SERIDA’s fruit-research programme. Two things it settles are corrections to what CiderHQ previously held: Asturias sorts cider fruit into nine technological blocks rather than five, and it publishes acidity as sulphuric acid rather than malic. The figures are transcribed into `data/trials/serida-asturias.ts` and cite this source, because this is where they were read.