Cider apple
Sops in Wine
An old English name for red-fleshed apples that stain the juice, applied to several distinct cultivars and identifying none of them reliably.
Also written Sops of Wine, Sop in Wine, Sops-in-Wine.
- Classification
- Sharp — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Early (September)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Aroma, Early season
- Origin
- England, probably the west of the country
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Sharp
High acid, low tannin. Includes both purpose-grown sharps and many culinary apples.
Basis: Above about 0.45% w/v acid and below about 0.2% w/v tannin.
Fruit grown under this name is generally described as a mild sharp. Because the name covers several cultivars, this placement describes the commonest form and cannot be treated as settled.
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 | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Description of fruit grown under this name, with deliberately wide bands because the name covers more than one cultivar.
Contributes moderate acid and a pink stain to the juice from its red-veined flesh.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Sops in Wine, 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 Sops in Wine. 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
- Early
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
September into October, though this varies with which fruit is meant.
No pollination group is recorded, and the name covers more than one cultivar.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Red-veined flesh that tints the juice pink
- Moderate acid
- Low tannin
How it is used
- Grown for the colour it lends a cider
- A minor component of West Country farm blends
- Recorded in English fruit lists from the seventeenth century onwards
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Made occasionally for its pink colour. The colour is unstable and the cider beneath it is unremarkable.
About Sops in Wine
Sops in Wine is a name before it is an apple. It appears in English fruit lists from the seventeenth century, describing fruit whose flesh is veined or stained red so that a cut apple looks like bread soaked in wine, and it has been applied since then to several genuinely different cultivars in different counties. There is no single Sops in Wine.
This record exists because the name is unavoidable — it turns up in old orchard lists, in collections and in modern plantings — and because the honest thing is to describe what it covers rather than to pick one accession and call it the cultivar. The commonest fruit grown under the name is a mild sharp with red-veined flesh, early-ripening and not long-keeping, and that is what the classification and profile here describe.
The colour is the reason anyone still grows it. Red pigment in the flesh carries into the juice and gives a pink cast that survives fermentation to a degree, though it fades with oxidation and with time. Producers using it for that effect protect the juice from air and bottle early, and generally blend rather than bottle it alone.
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 old and appears in early fruit lists, referring to the red staining of the flesh — like bread sopped in wine. It has been applied to several different apples in different counties and does not denote one cultivar.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Bloody Turk | Disputed identity | Occasionally equated with it on the strength of shared red flesh. They are recorded here as separate fruit. |
| Sops of Wine | Historic spelling | The commonest variant; neither form has priority. |
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.
Discovery
A very early red dessert apple raised in Essex, used by cidermakers to start the season with something aromatic and sharp.
Katy
A Swedish-raised dessert apple widely grown in Britain and one of the most used dessert cultivars in modern British single-varietal cider.
Cheddar Cross
A very early sharp raised at Long Ashton, giving acid at the start of the season when little else is ready.
James Grieve
A Scottish-raised dual-purpose apple of clean, bright acid, widely grown in Britain and pressed for acid and freshness in modern cider.
Browns Apple
The standard Devon sharp: a bright red, heavy-cropping, high-acid apple with almost no tannin, and the fruit most English blends reach for when they need lift.
Golden Russet
The highest-gravity fruit in widespread North American cider use — a small bronze russet from New York whose juice regularly presses above 1.060 and which many revival makers treat as their benchmark cultivar.
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
- Why does apple juice go brown when pressed — Polyphenol oxidase in the fruit reacts phenolics with oxygen the moment cells are broken, turning the juice brown. In cider making this is sometimes prevented with sulphite and sometimes encouraged, because it also drops harsh tannin out of solution.
- What is a traditional west country cider blend — Predominantly bittersweet fruit for body and tannin, with a proportion of sharp fruit for acidity and sometimes a smaller share of bittersharps for both. The exact composition varied by farm and by what was in the orchard.
- What is the redstreak apple — The Redstreak was the celebrated cider apple of seventeenth-century Herefordshire, promoted by improving writers and credited with launching a boom in bottled English cider. The fruit grown under the name today is not securely the same clone.
- What is herefordshire cider
- Where are perry pears grown
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.
A Somerset Pomona: The Cider Apples of Somerset
Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001. ISBN 9781874336877 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001, ISBN 9781874336877. The author was Long Ashton’s cider pomologist, which is why this work is registered for Somerset cultivar identity at all — it is the nearest thing to a successor to the station’s own descriptions. No copy was opened. Not digitised in any open collection.
University of Reading / Defra, Brogdale · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The UK national reference collection for apple and pear cultivars. The authority CiderHQ uses for whether two names are the same fruit, which is the central duplicate-resolution problem in cider data.
Pomona, or an Appendix concerning Fruit-Trees in relation to Cider
John Evelyn, Royal Society · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1664
Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1670 edition held by the Internet Archive. The attribution needs correcting and CiderHQ has corrected it: *Pomona* is not a book by John Evelyn. It is an appendix annexed to Evelyn’s *Sylva*, published by express order of the Royal Society, and the contributors recorded for the volume are John Evelyn, John Beale, Daniel Colwall, Paul Neile, John Newburgh and Sylas Taylor. Beale has his own entry in this register, and the overlap is not a coincidence — the two texts come out of the same Royal Society enquiry into cider in the 1660s. Citing *Pomona* as Evelyn’s flattens a collaborative compilation into a single-author work.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.