Oldfield

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.

A pale, low-acid juice with almost no astringency, giving a soft perry whose interest is in scent and texture rather than structure.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Oldfield, 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 Oldfield 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

Mid

Flowering

Mid flowering band

Vigour

Vigorous

Cropping

Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate

Keeping

Poor — mill soon after picking

Late September into October. The fruit does not signal ripeness clearly and is easily gathered a few days too late, at which point the juice loses its scent. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in November at Hartpury, one band later than the mid window recorded here.

Short. The flesh becomes mealy quickly once the fruit has fallen.

Mid-season flowering. Self-incompatible. The National Perry Pear Collection places it in the mid flowering band, from flowering records kept over many seasons.

Ripening moves with the site and the season. Where the National Perry Pear Collection’s observation at Hartpury falls in a different band from the window recorded here, both are kept rather than one overwriting the other.

Disease and pest susceptibility

Juice and pressing

• Low acid, low tannin
• Delicate aromatic character
• Retains obvious sweetness when fermented out, from sorbitol

How it is used

• Made as a single-variety perry in Worcestershire, and shown competitively in the nineteenth century when perry was still judged at agricultural shows.
• Blended with sharper fruit where a maker wants softness without adding weight.

On its own

About Oldfield

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.

The National Perry Pear Collection’s identifications are supported by DNA analysis of the trees it holds, which is why they are treated here as the stronger account where they conflict with a documentary one. Where the collection records a name for two varieties it holds as distinct, the name identifies a group of trees rather than one variety, and fruit offered under it needs checking against something other than its label.

Why it matters

• A cultivar whose reputation was made at nineteenth-century agricultural shows, when perry was judged alongside cider and livestock and had a competitive culture that has since largely disappeared.

Related cultivars

Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.

• Similar role

  Taynton Squash

  Another low-acid pear valued for delicacy rather than structure, and another with a reputation older than any analysis of it.

• Similar role

  Merrylegs

  A comparable soft, low-acid pear from further west.

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.

• Plant de Blanc

  The dominant poiré pear of the Domfrontais and the cultivar the Poiré Domfront appellation is built around.

• Taynton Squash

  A Gloucestershire pear named in seventeenth-century writing as one of the finest for perry, reduced to very few trees by the twentieth century and propagated back from them.

• Berllanderi Red

  The red-fruited pear of the Berllanderi pair, found on the same Monmouthshire holding and giving a softer, sweeter juice.

• Merrylegs

  A Monmouthshire perry pear from the group of cultivars named for the effects of their perry, giving a soft, low-acid juice.

• Painted Lady

  A strikingly flushed perry pear grown on both sides of the Welsh border, whose name has been applied to more than one tree and whose identity is not settled.

• Pine

  A Three Counties perry pear whose name claims a pineapple character in the fruit, a comparison that was a standard compliment in English fruit naming.

Styles it is characteristic of

• Perry

  The fermented drink of pears, a tradition parallel to cider rather than derived from it, in which unfermentable sorbitol leaves a sweetness the maker never chose.

• Bottle-conditioned perry

  Perry that completes its fermentation in the sealed bottle, generating carbonation and lees character while the fruit’s sorbitol keeps a sweetness the yeast cannot remove.

Where it grows

• Worcestershire
• Herefordshire
• Gloucestershire

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 long does cider take to ferment — A warm ferment with cultured yeast can finish in one to two weeks; a cool wild ferment in a cellar may take three months or more. Slow is not the same as stuck — the test is whether gravity is still falling.
• What is perry — Perry is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting the juice of pears, traditionally of specific perry pear cultivars rather than eating pears. It is to pears what cider is to apples, and has its own history in the three counties of England and in Normandy.
• How are apples milled for cider
• When are cider apples harvested — In the northern hemisphere the cider harvest runs from about September to November, with late bittersweets such as Dabinett and Vilberie coming in last. Cider fruit is generally picked riper than dessert fruit, and often gathered from the ground.
• What is juice blending
• How are perry pears classified — Perry pears are conventionally divided by acid and tannin into sweet, medium sharp, bittersharp and bittersweet, following the scheme used in the English perry literature. Sorbitol content matters too, and it does not appear in the classes.

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.

• Perry Pears

  L. C. Luckwill and A. Pollard (eds), published for the National Fruit and Cider Institute by the University of Bristol, 1963 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25 · covers 1963

  Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library, which records the work as Luckwill, 1963, published for the National Fruit and Cider Institute by the University of Bristol. The catalogue entry names Luckwill alone where the standard citation names Luckwill and Pollard as joint editors; CiderHQ keeps both names and records the discrepancy rather than silently following one catalogue. This is the foundational descriptive work on English perry pears and the ancestor of most later variety lists. No copy was opened: it is sixty years old, out of print, and held in research libraries rather than in open digital collections.

• National Perry Pear Centre

  National Perry Pear Centre, Hartpury · specialist organisation · passage verified 2026-08-24

  Read on 2026-08-24 — and the address CiderHQ had registered, perrypears.co.uk, is no longer the Centre at all. It fails the TLS handshake over https, and over plain http it resolves to a Sedo domain-parking page: an earlier pass in this sprint recorded it as retrieved on the strength of an HTTP 200, which was wrong, and the correction is the point. The Centre publishes at nationalperrypearcentre.org.uk. It is the closest thing British perry has to an identity authority: it holds at least two examples of most known varieties, states that the DNA of most of them has been determined and is used as an aid to identification, and publishes a variety register with synonym lists. Its 121-variety register is transcribed into the perry pear records, including the nineteen names it shows being claimed by more than one variety.

• Three Counties Cider and Perry Association

  TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24

• Research on pear juice composition and sorbitol in perry

  Various journals and institute reports · peer-reviewed literature · registered as competent for this subject

  The evidence base for the single most important chemical difference between cider and perry: pears carry substantial sorbitol, which yeast does not ferment, so a fully fermented perry retains sweetness a fully fermented cider cannot.