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History · 1950s to present

The perry revival

What brought perry back from near-extinction?

In short

Not demand. Traditional perry was rescued by conservation work: the survey and description of surviving trees in the 1960s, the propagation of varieties from them, and the deliberate maintenance of collections and competition classes by a handful of specialist organisations over the following fifty years.

Legal designation and a small specialist market came later and made the position more secure without making it comfortable. Perry remains a very small product made by a small number of people, and the age structure of the trees is still the central problem.

How close it came

By the 1950s and 1960s the conditions that had sustained perry had all gone. The orchards were old and had not been replanted for decades; the seasonal labour that gathered pears from very large trees had left the land; grubbing-up support made clearance cheap; and the commercial perry that most people had heard of was a manufactured sparkling drink with only a loose relationship to perry pears.

What remained was a small number of farms in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Monmouthshire still making perry, mostly for their own use, from trees planted by earlier generations. The knowledge of which varieties were which, and of how to handle a fruit that ripens in days, sat with individual people rather than in any institution.

A perry pear orchard is also uniquely difficult to restart. A tree may take fifteen years or more to give a useful crop and much longer to reach full bearing, which means that a decision to stop is effectively permanent within a working lifetime. Perry did not decline gradually towards a floor; it came close to a point beyond which recovery would have required starting from nothing.

The survey that saved the varieties

The decisive intervention was documentary. The systematic survey of English perry pear varieties published out of the cider research station in the early 1960s described the varieties then surviving, recorded where they grew, and set out their characteristics. It was compiled at the last moment when such a thing was possible, and it functions as a salvage record.

Its practical value is that it converted knowledge held by individuals into a reference anyone could use. A later worker finding an unfamiliar pear tree in a Gloucestershire hedge has a description to compare it against; without the survey, that tree would simply be an old pear.

The work also established how few varieties there were and how localised they had become. Many perry pears were confined to a small group of parishes and had never been planted outside them, so the loss of a handful of trees could take a variety out entirely. That finding is what turned perry from a declining product into a conservation problem with a defined scope.

Propagation, collections and the long wait

From the 1990s the specialist bodies for perry pears set about the slow work: locating surviving trees, identifying them against the survey and against each other, taking graft wood, and establishing collection orchards in which each variety exists in more than one place. The national perry pear collection and the county orchard groups in the three western counties and in Wales carry this work.

The arithmetic is unforgiving and worth stating. A variety grafted today is a specimen in five years and a cropping tree in fifteen or twenty. Anyone doing this work is planting for a successor, which is the sense of the old advice about planting pears for one’s heirs, and it is one of the reasons the effort depends so heavily on organisations rather than on individual producers.

Grafting also had to be relearned in one important respect. Perry pears are grafted onto pear rootstocks, and the choice of stock determines whether the resulting tree is the enormous traditional standard or something smaller that can be picked and managed. Modern plantings often use half-standard forms, which changes the orchard but makes the crop recoverable.

Designation, and what it does

Protected geographical indications for perry were registered in the twenty-first century for the traditional product of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and for traditional Welsh perry, alongside the equivalent cider designations. Each specifies the area, the fruit and the method in a published specification.

What a designation does is protect a name against use by products that do not meet the specification, and give the producers who do meet it a defensible claim. That is genuinely useful in a market where the word perry has been used for pear drinks made from concentrate and from dessert pears, and where the term pear cider muddied the distinction further.

What a designation does not do is plant a tree, provide labour, or create demand. It protects a name, and a name is only worth protecting if somebody is still making the thing. The designations came after the conservation work, not instead of it, and describing them as the cause of the revival inverts the sequence.

The distinction that mattersTraditional perry is made from perry pears. Drinks labelled pear cider are frequently made from dessert or culinary pears or from concentrate, and United Kingdom duty categories do not separate the two. A protected designation is currently the clearest signal available on a label.

The market, and what is still not secure

A small specialist market did appear, through festivals, competition classes with perry categories, specialist retail and the interest of drinkers who had discovered cider first. Perry benefits from being genuinely unlike anything else: high in sorbitol, so sweet-tasting even when fully fermented, and unlike any pear drink most people have encountered.

It is nonetheless a difficult product to sell at the price it costs to make. The fruit is expensive to gather, the losses are higher than for cider, the volumes are tiny, and a producer cannot readily scale up in response to demand because the fruit supply is fixed by trees planted long ago. Several of the organisations that support perry do so precisely because the market alone would not sustain it.

The unresolved problem is the age of the trees. A large proportion of the traditional perry pear population is very old, and the rate of new planting is not obviously sufficient to replace it. What has been secured is the varieties, in collections and in scattered young plantings. What has not been secured is a working orchard base of the kind that supported perry when it was an ordinary drink, and it is not clear that one is being rebuilt.

How this developed

Certainty is marked on each entry. Where the popular account runs ahead of the evidence, that is said rather than smoothed over.

  1. 1950s–1960s

    The low point

    Old perry orchards are cleared or abandoned, seasonal labour has gone, and traditional perry survives on a small number of farms making it largely for themselves.

  2. Early 1960s

    The varieties described

    A systematic survey of English perry pear varieties records what survives and where, converting individual knowledge into a usable reference.

  3. From the 1990s

    Survey, identification and grafting

    Specialist bodies and county orchard groups locate surviving trees, identify varieties and establish collection orchards.

  4. 1990s–2000s

    A specialist market appears

    Festivals, competition classes and specialist retail create a small route to market for traditionally made perry.

  5. Twenty-first century

    Geographical protection registered

    Protected designations are registered for traditional perry in the three western counties and in Wales, specifying area, fruit and method.

  6. Present· probable

    Varieties secured, orchards not

    The varieties survive in collections and scattered young plantings; the traditional orchard population remains old and is not being replaced at a comparable rate.

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