Cider apple
José Antonio
A Galician cultivar carrying a personal name, used in the region’s cider and characteristic of how Galician fruit was identified and propagated.
Also written Jose Antonio, Xosé Antonio.
- Classification
- Semi-acid — Asturian technological blocks
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Galicia
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
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 | Moderate | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
A thin descriptive record from Galician orchard practice. This is the least well evidenced blend profile in the file and is marked accordingly.
Moderately acid and mild; the descriptive record does not support anything more specific.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for José Antonio, 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 José Antonio. 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
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
Juice and pressing
- Moderate acid
- Low phenolics
How it is used
- Galician farm cider
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
No practice of it and no evidence that it would work.
About José Antonio
José Antonio is included as a representative of the least documented end of the Spanish record, and the entry is deliberately short. It is a Galician cultivar with a personal name, used in local cider, and almost nothing beyond that can be stated with confidence.
The naming pattern is the one point of substance. Across Atlantic Iberia, cultivars named after people generally trace to a single tree on a single holding, propagated outward by grafting among neighbours. That gives such names a better claim to identifying one clone than colour or shape names have — but it says nothing about when, and it leaves the fruit invisible to any record outside the parish.
CiderHQ records the cultivar with a `described` confidence on its blend profile and a provisional classification, because recording it honestly at low confidence is more useful than either omitting it or dressing it up.
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
A personal name of the sort attached to a tree noticed on a particular holding. Who, and when, is not recorded.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Xosé Antonio | Regional name | Galicia. The Galician form of the same personal name. |
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.
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.
Clara
A pale Asturian semi-sharp of moderate acid and mild character, permitted within the designation and planted as a blending component.
Perico
A vigorous, very late-flowering Asturian cultivar in the semi-acid block at 3,9 g/L, planted on the permitted list for balance rather than for correction.
Solarina
A very vigorous, heavy-cropping Asturian cultivar in the semi-acid block, ripening in late October and carrying a little more phenolic weight than the regional floor.
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.
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.
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 do you blend cider
- Why is galician cider so little known — Yes, and it has been documented for centuries, but it has always been overshadowed by Asturias next door and by Galicia’s own wine. It holds no protected cider name and its cultivar repertoire — Repinaldo, Rabiosa, Ollo Mouro — is its own.
- Is cider made in galicia
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.