Cider apple
Rabiosa
A sharp Galician cultivar whose name — “the furious one” — is a fair description of how its juice tastes.
Also written Rabiosa de Galicia.
- Classification
- Acid — Asturian technological blocks
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Acid lift
- 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
Acid · Ácido
High acid, low phenolics. The largest single block and the backbone of *sidra natural*.
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 | High | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Light |
Description as a markedly sharp Galician cultivar, classified by approximation under the Asturian scheme.
Very sharp and hard, with the aggressive sourness the name records.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Rabiosa, 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 Rabiosa. 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
- High acid
- Low sugar
- Low phenolics
How it is used
- Acid correction in Galician farm cider
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
Punishingly sharp alone.
About Rabiosa
Rabiosa is a sharp Galician apple with a candid name: rabiosa means furious or rabid, and it is a description of the acidity rather than of the tree. Names of this kind — bad-tempered, bland, hard, dark — are a good sign that a cultivar was named by the people who had to eat and press it.
Galician cider fruit shares the Atlantic Spanish pattern: acid-dominant, low in phenolics, and used in blends fermented dry. What distinguishes the Galician tradition is scale and continuity. It survived mainly as household production, its cultivar record is thinner than Asturias’s, and the modern revival is working with a smaller and less well characterised set of fruit.
The record for this cultivar is correspondingly thin, and the entry does not extend beyond what can be said honestly: a sharp Galician apple used for acid, with a classification borrowed from a neighbouring scheme.
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 descriptive Galician name. As elsewhere in Atlantic Iberia, descriptive names are applied locally to more than one fruit.
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.
Blanquina
A pale-skinned Asturian cultivar of high reputation, and — like Raxao, with which it is usually named — an acid-block fruit rather than a semi-acid one.
Txalaka
The most widely recognised Basque cider apple: a hard, sharp, late cultivar from Gipuzkoa that supplies much of the acid backbone of *sagardoa*.
Raxao
One of the two Asturian cultivars named whenever a producer describes a serious blend, and an acid rather than semi-acid fruit: 5,3 g/L against only 0,8 of polyphenols.
Xuanina
An Asturian cultivar the designation files in the acid block on figures that are not, themselves, high in acid — and whose published characterisation duplicates another variety’s exactly.
Fuentes
The second-most acid cultivar the Asturian designation characterises: a vigorous, heavy-cropping tree whose juice runs to 6,2 g/L of acid, and which and which sits at the opposite end of the register from the sweet block.
Limón Montés
A yellow Asturian sharp whose name — “mountain lemon” — describes both its colour and the citric edge of its acidity.
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
- How do you adjust the acidity of 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.