Raxao

How it is classified

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.

Firmly acid with almost no phenolic weight, and a fuller, riper aroma than most Asturian fruit — which is what its reputation rests on rather than its structure.

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.

• Ripe apple — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
• Fresh-cut apple — The smell of a cut apple surface, produced within seconds of the fruit tissue being broken by six-carbon aldehydes released from membrane fats.

Put Raxao into a blend

Measured analysis

Each figure is shown with where and when it was taken. They are not averaged: the same cultivar grown in another climate genuinely gives different numbers, and collapsing them into one would be the most misleading thing this page could do.

Compare within a study to see where these figures sat among the other cultivars the same work analysed — which is a more robust statement than the figures themselves, because absolute values move between laboratories and the ordering inside one study mostly survives.

Watched in the orchard

What named research programmes recorded about this fruit at their own sites. Bloom, harvest and cropping belong to a place and a run of seasons rather than to a cultivar, so they are reported site by site rather than merged.

In the orchard

Harvest window

Very late

Flowering

Pollination group 3

Vigour

Moderate

Cropping

Slightly biennial

Keeping

Good

The Consejo Regulador records ripening in the first half of November (“1ª quincena de noviembre”).

Notably regular for an Asturian cultivar, which is a large part of its commercial standing.

Disease and pest susceptibility

Juice and pressing

• High acid at 5,3 g/L, well inside the acid block
• Phenolics at the Asturian floor, 0,8 g/L: this fruit brings no grip at all
• The aromatic quality it is valued for is not something the published analysis captures

How it is used

• A quality component in sidra natural, and one of the cultivars a llagar will name when describing its blend
• On the permitted-variety list of the Asturian protected designation

On its own

About Raxao

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.

Related cultivars

Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.

• Traditional blend partner

  Blanquina

  The other high-reputation Asturian semi-sharp; the pair are named together constantly.

• Traditional blend partner

  Regona

  The sharp fruit Raxao is blended with.

• Often confused with

  Coloradona

  Both are mid-season Asturian semi-sharps and parish names for them overlap.

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*.

• 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.

• Prieta

  A dark-skinned Asturian cultivar in the acid block at 4,8 g/L, whose phenolic content is ordinary rather than the bittersharp weight it was once credited with.

• Arbeya

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as acid — 4,81 g/L of acid above the register’s median, with 1,2 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the last ten days of October.

• Carrandona

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as acid — 5,14 g/L of acid above the register’s median, with 1,07 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the second ten days of November.

Styles it is characteristic of

• Sidra natural

  The still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, wild-fermented from local high-acid fruit and poured from a height to raise a momentary sparkle.

• Sidra de nueva expresión

  A modern Asturian category of filtered, clean, dry cider made with controlled fermentation and presented in a wine format rather than in the poured tradition.

• Sidra espumosa

  Sparkling Asturian cider made by a second fermentation under pressure or in bottle, presented as a fine sparkling drink rather than in the still poured tradition.

Where it grows

• Asturias
• Asturian coastal comarca

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 malolactic fermentation — Malolactic fermentation is a bacterial conversion of sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid, releasing carbon dioxide. It lowers total acidity and raises pH, and in cider it is often the source of a farmyard or buttery note as well.
• What does fresh-cut apple mean in a cider tasting note — The smell of a cut apple surface, produced within seconds of the fruit tissue being broken by six-carbon aldehydes released from membrane fats.
• Where does a ripe apple aroma in cider come from — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
• What is sidra natural — Sidra natural is the still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, bottled without added carbonation and poured from a height to rouse it. It is tart, funky and made to be drunk in small measures poured one at a time.

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.

• Denominación de Origen Protegida Sidra de Asturias

  Consejo Regulador de la DOP Sidra de Asturias · designation authority · passage verified 2026-08-24

  The regulating council for Asturian cider. Read on 2026-08-24, and it turned out to carry far more than a permitted-variety list: an agronomic and technological characterisation of each admitted variety, with total acidity, total polyphenols, vigour, flowering, ripening, cropping and susceptibility to fungal disease. The characterisation is credited to SERIDA’s fruit-research programme. Two things it settles are corrections to what CiderHQ previously held: Asturias sorts cider fruit into nine technological blocks rather than five, and it publishes acidity as sulphuric acid rather than malic. The figures are transcribed into `data/trials/serida-asturias.ts` and cite this source, because this is where they were read.