Cider apple
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.
Also written Mokotea, Mokote 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
- 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 in Basque practice, with the caveat that the cultivar is not clearly separated from Moko in the record.
Drying and faintly bitter, as Moko is; the differences reported between them are small and not consistently reported.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Mokote, 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 Mokote. 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
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Phenolic content high by Basque standards
- Low acid
How it is used
- A structural addition to Basque sagardoa
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
As for Moko.
About Mokote
Mokote is recorded separately from Moko because Basque orchard practice names it separately, and with an explicit statement that CiderHQ cannot tell them apart from the available record. The Basque suffix -te is augmentative, so the name reads roughly as "the big Moko", which is the kind of relationship that could describe a distinct cultivar, a size selection, or two names for one tree.
This is a recurring problem in the Atlantic cider regions and not a Basque peculiarity. The Fréquins in Normandy, the Duronas in Asturias, the Binets and the Locards are all families where descriptive names have multiplied faster than distinct cultivars. Modern identification work resolves such questions where it has been done; where it has not, the honest record is a record of the uncertainty.
Its use is the same as Moko’s: a small proportion of a blend, for the phenolic weight that Basque fruit otherwise lacks.
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
The name is built on the same root as Moko with a Basque augmentative suffix, which suggests either a larger-fruited form of the same thing or a related selection. Neither is established.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
- 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.
- 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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.