Cider apple
Urtebi Txiki
The smaller-fruited Urtebi, a sharp Basque cultivar used alongside its larger counterpart and not always distinguishable from it.
Also written Urtebi Chiqui, Urtebi Tiki.
- Classification
- Acid — Asturian technological blocks
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift
- 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.
Sharper and more concentrated than the larger Urtebi, with a slightly firmer texture — differences that are as likely to reflect fruit size as cultivar identity.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Urtebi Txiki, 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 Txiki. 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
- Lower juice yield per tonne than 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 Txiki
Urtebi Txiki is recorded separately from Urtebi Haundi because Basque practice records it separately, with the reservation that the distinction rests on a character — fruit size — that varies for reasons unrelated to cultivar identity.
Small fruit has real consequences at the press. A tonne of small apples has more skin and less flesh than a tonne of large ones, which raises the phenolic contribution per litre and lowers the juice yield. If the two Urtebis differ analytically, some of that difference may be a size effect rather than a cultivar effect, and the two explanations are hard to separate without controlled sampling.
What is recorded here is the class, the season and the orchard behaviour, with the identity question flagged rather than resolved. That is the honest state of the record.
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
See Urtebi Haundi: the relationship between the two is not established.
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 are apples milled for cider
- 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 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.