Cider apple
Txalaka
The most widely recognised Basque cider apple: a hard, sharp, late cultivar from Gipuzkoa that supplies much of the acid backbone of sagardoa.
Also written Chalaca, Txalaka Sagarra.
- Classification
- Acid — Asturian technological blocks
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Late season, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Gipuzkoa, Basque Country
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- 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 | Slight | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Sharp placement under the Asturian scheme applied across the provincial boundary, together with a consistent Basque description of high-acid fruit.
Hard-fleshed and bracingly acid, with a faint drying edge and almost no sweetness. It is not fruit anybody eats.
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.
- 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.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Txalaka. 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
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
Late, gathered from the ground as the fruit falls, and held in the sagardotegi before milling. The Basque harvest pattern resembles the Asturian one.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | A significant issue in the wet Atlantic climate of Gipuzkoa. |
| Fire blight | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- High malic acid and a low pH, which underwrites the safety of a long uninoculated ferment
- Low phenolics with a trace of astringency
- Ferments slowly through a cool Basque winter
How it is used
- A core acid component of Basque sagardoa
- Recognised within the Basque protected designation framework for cider made from Basque-grown fruit
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Basque cider is a blending tradition and single-varietal bottlings are a modern minority. Txalaka alone would be very dry and very sharp.
About Txalaka
Txalaka is the cultivar that a reader outside Spain is most likely to encounter when Basque cider is described, and it is representative in the right ways. It is hard, it is late, it is very sharp, and it carries almost no tannin — which is to say it is a Basque cider apple.
Basque sagardoa and Asturian sidra natural are close relatives and not the same drink. Both are fermented dry from wild populations, both run a malolactic conversion, both tolerate a degree of oxidation and of volatile-phenol character that a modern cidery would treat as a fault, and both are poured to break the liquid and release what carbonation there is. The Basque tradition is distinguished by the txotx season, when cider is drawn straight from the kupela in the cider house from January into spring, and by a style that tends drier and more austere than the Asturian.
The classification recorded here needs a caveat that applies to every Basque record in this file. Basque practice describes fruit in Basque — garratza, sour; gozoa, sweet; mikatza, bitter — and CiderHQ’s registered scheme for Spanish fruit is the Asturian one. Applying it across the boundary is a reasonable approximation and it is not what Basque growers do. Where the note matters, it is stated on the record.
Scab is the main orchard constraint, as it is throughout Atlantic Spain and France. Basque orchards have been replanted extensively since the revival of the cider houses from the late twentieth century onwards, and the cultivars that came through that replanting were chosen partly for how they handle a wet climate.
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
Basque cider cultivars were selected in farm orchards over centuries and named in Basque, a language unrelated to the Romance languages around it. Almost none has a documented origin.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Chalaca | Historic spelling | Gipuzkoa. The Castilian transcription of the Basque name. |
Why it matters
- The Basque cultivar most likely to be named outside the Basque Country
- A demonstration that the Atlantic Spanish cider traditions are built on acid rather than tannin, in contrast to the French and English ones
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.
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.
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.
Fresnosa
An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as acid — 5,0 g/L of acid above the register’s median, with 0,93 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the second ten days of November.
Josefa
An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as acid — 8,51 g/L of acid well above the register’s median, with 0,93 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.
Euskal Sagardoa
Basque cider under its own protected designation, made from Basque-grown apples in the *sagardotegi* tradition of barrel service and dry, high-acid, still cider.
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
- 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.
- 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.
- Can you use windfall apples for cider — Traditional cider making relies on fruit gathered from the ground, and there is nothing wrong with it if it is sound. Rotten fruit is a different matter: brown rot carries patulin into the juice and should be discarded, not pressed.
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
Euskal Sagardoa / Sidra Natural del País Vasco protected designation
Eusko Label / Basque Government · designation authority · registered as competent for this subject
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.
Campo, Santos, Berregi and Munduate, Food Control 16(6) · peer-reviewed literature · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25 · covers 2005
Thirty-five juices from five Basque cider apple varieties — Gezamina, Moko, Goikoetxea, Txalaka and Urtebi — characterised on fourteen variables and shown by cluster and principal-component analysis to separate by cultivar. Bibliographic identity, authorship, journal and DOI verified against the Crossref register on 2026-08-25; the article itself is behind a subscription, its abstract is elided from every open index CiderHQ tried, and no numeric figure from it is published here. It is cited on the Basque cultivar pages for the finding that the varieties are chemically distinguishable, which is what a citation to an unread paper can honestly support.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.