Cider apple
Ollo Mouro
A Galician cultivar named for its dark eye, used in the region’s cider and one of the fruits its small revival has taken up.
Also written Ollo Mouro de Galicia, Ojo Moro.
- Classification
- Semi-acid — Asturian technological blocks
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Aroma, Sugar and body
- Origin
- Galicia
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
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 | High | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Description in Galician practice as a balanced blending cultivar; the classification is an approximation.
Moderate acid with a slight drying edge and a fair amount of fruit character; balanced by Galician standards.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Ollo Mouro, 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 Ollo Mouro. 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
- Good
Juice and pressing
- Balanced acid
- A trace of phenolic material
- Reasonable sugar
How it is used
- Galician farm cider
- The modern Galician cider revival
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Balanced enough in principle; the volumes involved in Galician cider are small and the practice is not established.
About Ollo Mouro
Ollo Mouro is named for the dark ring around its calyx — the "eye" of the apple — and it is one of the handful of Galician cultivars that the region’s small modern cider producers have converged on. It is balanced by the standards of Atlantic Iberian fruit, with moderate acid, a trace of phenolic material and enough sugar to contribute usefully to a blend.
Galician cider is worth distinguishing from its better-known neighbours rather than folding into them. The region’s drinking culture is dominated by wine — the Ribeiro, the Rías Baixas, the Ribeira Sacra — and cider has always occupied a smaller, more domestic place than in Asturias or the Basque Country. The revival is correspondingly modest and often works with orchards and cultivars that were never commercially selected.
What can be said about this cultivar is what Galician practice says: it is used, it is balanced, it is being planted. There is no verified analysis, and the classification borrowed from Asturias is flagged as an approximation.
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.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Ojo Moro | Historic spelling | The Castilian rendering of the Galician name, which means “dark eye” and refers to the pigmented depression at the calyx end. |
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.
Manttoni
A Basque cultivar of good reputation with balanced acid and pronounced aroma, one of the cultivars a *sagardotegi* will name when describing a serious blend.
Repinaldo
A conical Galician apple of long standing, one of the cultivars the region’s small cider revival has built on, and a name shared with fruit elsewhere in Iberia.
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.
Goikoetxe
An aromatic Basque cultivar from Bizkaia, valued for the fruit character it brings to a blend that is otherwise built on acid.
Panquerina
A mild Asturian semi-sharp of local reputation, used as a middle term in blends and permitted within the Asturian designation.
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.
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
- 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.