Cider apple
Urtebi Haundi
The larger-fruited of a pair of Basque sharp cultivars distinguished only by size, and one of the standard acid components of sagardoa.
Also written Urtebi Handi, Urtebi Aundi.
- Classification
- Acid — Asturian technological blocks
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Gipuzkoa, Basque Country
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- 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 | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Sharp placement under the Asturian scheme, applied across the boundary.
Clean and sharp, larger and slightly milder than its smaller counterpart.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Urtebi Haundi, 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 Urtebi Haundi. 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
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- High acid
- Good juice yield from the larger fruit
- Low phenolics
How it is used
- Acid in Basque sagardoa blends
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
No tradition of it.
About Urtebi Haundi
Urtebi Haundi is one half of a pair — haundi for large, txiki for small — and the pairing is the interesting part. Distinguishing two cultivars by fruit size is inherently unstable, because apple size responds strongly to crop load, tree age, rootstock and season. A heavily cropping Urtebi Haundi and a lightly cropping Urtebi Txiki would be hard to tell apart on a bench.
Whether they are genuinely distinct clones, two selections from one seedling population, or one cultivar that acquired two names in different orchards, is not established. The Basque collection work carried out since the cider revival has begun to characterise the region’s fruit properly, and questions of this kind are the sort that modern identification methods can answer where description alone cannot.
In use it is an ordinary Basque sharp: high acid, no tannin worth counting, and a job to do in a blend. Its larger fruit gives marginally better juice yield, which is the only practical difference a sagardotegi would notice.
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 pairing with Urtebi Txiki suggests either two selections from one population or one cultivar split by fruit size. Which is not established, and DNA work would be needed to settle it.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Urtebi Handi | Historic spelling | Gipuzkoa. Basque orthography varies between *haundi* and *handi* for “big”; the fruit is the same. |
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*.
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.
Teórica
An Asturian sharp with an odd, bookish name and an entirely ordinary role: acid for a blend, in a region that runs on it.
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
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 pressing yield — Pressing yield is the proportion of fruit weight recovered as juice. It varies from under half on a poorly loaded basket press to around seventy per cent on a well-run rack-and-cloth or belt press.
- What is txalaka — One of the principal Basque cider apple varieties, and among the five whose juices a 2005 chemometric study showed to be chemically separable from one another. CiderHQ publishes no figure from that study because the article is subscription-only and its abstract could not be read at source.
- What is euskal sagardoa
- What is basque cider
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
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.