Verdialona

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.

Low in acid for Asturian fruit and low in phenolics with it: a mild apple whose green skin suggests a sharpness the juice does not carry.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Verdialona, 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.

Put Verdialona 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 4

Vigour

Vigorous

Cropping

Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate

Keeping

Good

The Consejo Regulador records ripening in the second to third ten days of November (“2ª – 3ª decena de noviembre”).

Disease and pest susceptibility

Juice and pressing

• Low acid by Asturian standards, which makes it a diluent rather than a structural fruit
• Very low phenolics — 0,8 g/L, at the floor of the Asturian range
• Ripens very late, so it arrives when the sharp fruit is already in

How it is used

• Late acid correction in sidra natural
• On the permitted-variety list of the Asturian protected designation

On its own

About Verdialona

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.

• Similar role

  Durona de Tresali

  The other late Asturian sharp, harder and better keeping.

• Often confused with

  Limón Montés

  Both are green-yellow Asturian sharps and local names 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.

• Chata blanca

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as sweet — 1,82 g/L of acid well below the register’s median, with 0,99 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the first ten days of November.

• Verdosa

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as sweet — 2,02 g/L of acid well below the register’s median, with 0,49 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the second ten days of November.

• Gezamiña

  A Basque sweet cultivar whose name derives from the word for bland or insipid, describing exactly what it contributes: sugar without acid.

• Cristalina

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as sweet — 3,27 g/L of acid below the register’s median, with 0,7 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the last ten days of November.

• Montés de flor

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as sweet — 2,88 g/L of acid well below the register’s median, with 1,3 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the first ten days of November.

• Paraguas

  An Asturian cider apple admitted to the protected designation and characterised as sweet — 3,08 g/L of acid well below the register’s median, with 1,13 g/L of polyphenols, ripening in the last 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.

Where it grows

• Asturias

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 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.
• How long can apples be kept before pressing
• What is a durona apple — The *duronas* are the hard-fleshed Asturian apples, and Durona de Tresali, from a parish in the Nalón valley, is the best known of them. It ripens in the last ten days of November and keeps for months, which is what lets a *llagar* go on pressing long after the harvest itself has finished.
• What is asturian 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.

• 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.