Perry pear
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.
Also written The Painted Lady.
- Classification
- Sweet — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Aroma
- Origin
- The Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire border country
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Flowering
- Mid flowering band
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
Perry pear classification
Sweet
Low acid, low tannin. Mild perry pears giving soft, light perry.
Low acid and low tannin on the descriptive material. Because the name covers more than one tree, a class assigned to "Painted Lady" carries the uncertainty of the identity with it.
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 | Low | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Descriptive accounts of a soft, low-acid pear, with the confidence lowered because the name does not resolve to a single tree with certainty.
A conspicuously flushed fruit giving a soft, low-acid juice; the perry is light and sweet-finishing, with the sorbitol unmasked by any real acidity.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Painted Lady, 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 Painted Lady. 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
- Mid flowering band
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Late September into October, on the descriptions available. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in late August or early September at Hartpury, one band earlier than the mid window recorded here.
Mid-season. Self-incompatible. The National Perry Pear Collection places it in the mid flowering band, from flowering records kept over many seasons.
Pears are not self-fertile. A variety needs another in blossom at the same time to set fruit, which is why the flowering band matters more in a perry orchard than the harvest window does.
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
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Pear scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Low acid, low tannin
- Noticeably sweet finish after fermentation
How it is used
- Grown in border orchards in England and Wales, and recorded by the Welsh Perry and Cider Society among the pears of Monmouthshire.
- Used to soften sharper blends.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made alone occasionally. Anyone bottling it single-variety is asserting an identity that the name alone does not establish, which is worth saying openly on a label.
About Painted Lady
Painted Lady is a perry pear with a bright red flush over a yellow ground, and a name that describes exactly that. The trouble with a descriptive name is that it can be coined more than once. A flushed pear in a Monmouthshire orchard and a flushed pear in a Gloucestershire one may both be called Painted Lady without being the same tree, and there is some evidence that this is precisely what happened.
It is also recorded as a name for Blakeney Red in parts of Gloucestershire. CiderHQ keeps the two as separate records, marks the equation as disputed on both, and does not resolve it, because resolving it would mean choosing between accounts on no better basis than preference. Anyone selling a single-variety Painted Lady perry is asserting an identity the name does not by itself establish.
What is consistently described is a soft, low-acid, low-tannin fruit making a light perry that finishes sweet. With so little acid, nothing masks the sorbitol that survives fermentation, and the result reads as medium even when the yeast has taken every fermentable sugar. It is grown on both sides of the border and is claimed, reasonably, by growers in Monmouthshire and in Gloucestershire alike.
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
Unrecorded, and complicated by the name having been used descriptively. A pear with a bright red flush on a yellow ground invites the name independently in more than one place.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Blakeney Red | Disputed identity | Some Gloucestershire accounts treat Painted Lady as a name for Blakeney Red. CiderHQ keeps the records separate and marks the equation unresolved. |
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 worked example of a descriptive name becoming a cultivar name in more than one place at once, and of the identity problem that follows.
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.
Plant de Blanc
The dominant poiré pear of the Domfrontais and the cultivar the Poiré Domfront appellation is built around.
Oldfield
A Worcestershire perry pear with a nineteenth-century show reputation, giving a light, low-acid perry that has been made single-variety for well over a century.
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.
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.
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 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.
- 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.
- What is still perry
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.
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.
WPCS · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Documents Welsh cider and perry traditions and has done substantial work identifying and conserving Welsh perry pear cultivars that were close to being lost.
Gloucestershire Orchard Trust · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.