Cider apple
Gezamiña
A Basque sweet cultivar whose name derives from the word for bland or insipid, describing exactly what it contributes: sugar without acid.
Also written Gezamina, Gezamiña Sagarra.
- Classification
- Sweet — Asturian technological blocks
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Basque Country
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
Asturian technological blocks
Sweet · Dulce
Low acid and low phenolics. Contributes sugar and body without sharpening or gripping the blend.
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 | Very low | |
| Tannin | Negligible | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Medium |
Sweet placement under the Asturian scheme, applied across the boundary and consistent with the meaning of the cultivar name.
Mild to the point of blandness, with sugar and very little else. The name is an accurate description.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Gezamiña, 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.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Gezamiña. 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
- Mid
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Sugar with almost no acid
- High pH; a liability on its own
- Low phenolics
How it is used
- Gravity and softening in Basque sagardoa blends
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
A wild ferment on a must this high in pH would be a genuine risk, and the result would be characterless.
About Gezamiña
Gezamiña carries one of the more candid cultivar names in European pomology. Geza means bland — unsalted, unsavoury, lacking — and a Basque farmer naming an apple that way was recording an accurate impression of a fruit that tastes of sugar and nothing much else.
It is nonetheless useful, and the reason is arithmetic rather than sensory. Basque cider is fermented dry, so all its alcohol comes from fruit sugar; a blend of nothing but sharp cultivars ferments to a low-alcohol, hard, thin cider. Sweet fruit raises the gravity, and Gezamiña does that job without introducing anything else.
The naming pattern is worth noting alongside the Asturian one. Both regions name cultivars by colour, shape, place, farmstead and, occasionally, by an honest assessment of the flavour. Cider fruit names across Europe are rarely flattering, which is a reasonable indication that they were coined by people who had eaten the apples rather than by people selling the trees.
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
Geza in Basque means unsalted, bland, lacking savour. A cultivar named for tasting of nothing much is being described by contrast with the sharp fruit around it.
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.
Patzuloa
A Basque cultivar at the mild end of the range, used for sugar and softness in *sagardoa* blends built on sharper fruit.
Verdialona
A late green Asturian apple the designation places in the sweet block, at 2,7 g/L of acid — low for a region whose fruit is built on acidity.
Chata blanca
An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as sweet — 1,82 g/L of acid well below the register’s median, with 0,99 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the first ten days of November.
Dura
An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as sweet — 3,37 g/L of acid below the register’s median, with 1,05 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the first ten days of October.
Paraguas
An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as sweet — 3,08 g/L of acid well below the register’s median, with 1,13 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the last ten days of November.
Verdosa
An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as sweet — 2,02 g/L of acid well below the register’s median, with 0,49 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the second ten days of November.
Styles it is characteristic of
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
- What is txalaka — One of the principal Basque cider apple varieties, and among the five whose juices a 2005 chemometric study showed to be chemically separable from one another. CiderHQ publishes no figure from that study because the article is subscription-only and its abstract could not be read at source.
- 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 euskal sagardoa
- What is basque 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.
NEIKER Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development
NEIKER · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
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.
Campo, Santos, Berregi and Munduate, Food Control 16(6) · peer-reviewed literature · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25 · covers 2005
Thirty-five juices from five Basque cider apple varieties — Gezamina, Moko, Goikoetxea, Txalaka and Urtebi — characterised on fourteen variables and shown by cluster and principal-component analysis to separate by cultivar. Bibliographic identity, authorship, journal and DOI verified against the Crossref register on 2026-08-25; the article itself is behind a subscription, its abstract is elided from every open index CiderHQ tried, and no numeric figure from it is published here. It is cited on the Basque cultivar pages for the finding that the varieties are chemically distinguishable, which is what a citation to an unread paper can honestly support.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.