Cider apple
Moko
A Basque bitter cultivar, one of the few in a region whose fruit is otherwise almost entirely acid, used in small proportion for the grip it supplies.
Also written Moko Sagarra.
- Classification
- Bitter — Asturian technological blocks
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure
- Origin
- Basque Country
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
Asturian technological blocks
Bitter · Amargo
Phenolics dominant, acid low. Asturias has few of these, and they are used sparingly.
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 | Low | |
| Tannin | Firm | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Bitter placement under the Asturian scheme, banded relative to the Atlantic Spanish population.
Drying and faintly bitter, noticeably more so than the Basque sharps and a long way short of a Norman bitter.
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.
- 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 Moko. 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 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- The highest phenolic content in common Basque use
- Low acid
- Adds mouthfeel to a blend at small proportions
How it is used
- A structural addition to Basque sagardoa, used sparingly
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
Unbalanced alone, and no tradition of attempting it.
About Moko
Moko is one of the very few Basque cultivars with real phenolic weight, and its function in a blend is exactly analogous to Collaos in Asturias: a small proportion added for grip, in a tradition where grip is otherwise absent.
The word "bitter" has to be handled carefully across these traditions. A Basque mikatza or an Asturian amarga is bitter relative to Atlantic Spanish fruit; a Norman amère is bitter relative to Norman fruit, which is already tannic by any standard. The same adjective describes two very different concentrations of procyanidin. Anyone building a blend across traditions, or reading a description written in one and applying it in another, needs to know that.
What a small addition of Moko does to a sagardoa is add weight in the middle of the palate and a slight drying finish, which gives the cider something to hold on to after the sharp acid of the base fruit has passed. Basque cider is austere by design, and this is one of the few tools available to keep austere from becoming thin.
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
Moko means beak or point in Basque, which is probably a description of fruit shape.
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.
Amariega
An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as bitter — 2,1 g/L of acid well below the register’s median, with 2,4 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the last ten days of October.
Clarina
An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as bitter — 1,7 g/L of acid well below the register’s median, with 2,1 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the first ten days of October.
Mokote
A Basque bitter cultivar related in name to Moko and not reliably distinguished from it, used for the same purpose and in the same small quantity.
Dabinett
The most widely planted English cider apple: a small, late-ripening bittersweet whose soft, full tannin ferments into a cider that needs almost nothing added to it.
Harrison
The cider apple of eighteenth-century New Jersey, believed extinct for most of the twentieth century and refound in the 1970s; small, russeted, very high in sugar and the nearest thing North America has to a vintage cultivar of its own.
Hewe’s Crab
The historic cider crab of Virginia — small, hard, very high in acid and unusually tannic for an American apple, and probably a hybrid between a cultivated apple and a native crab.
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 maceration in cider making — Maceration is letting milled pomace stand before pressing, so that enzymes soften the tissue and phenolics and aroma move from the skins into the juice. It raises both colour and tannin, and raises the risk of oxidation with them.
- Why does cider smell of apple skin
- Which asturian cider apple ripens latest — Collaos, at the very end of November — later than almost anything else on the designation’s permitted list, which matters because it sets when an Asturian pressing season can actually finish.
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.