Perry pear
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.
Also written Pine Pear, Pineapple Pear.
- Classification
- Sweet — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Aroma, Sugar and body
- Origin
- Gloucestershire and Herefordshire
- 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. The class placement rests on descriptive material rather than analysis.
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 | Pronounced | |
| Body | Medium |
Descriptive material, with the aroma band raised because the cultivar’s name and its descriptions both emphasise scent.
A sweet, low-acid juice with a distinctly aromatic character; whether it resembles pineapple is a matter of perception rather than a property of the fruit.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Pine, 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 Pine. 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. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in late October or early November at Hartpury, one band later 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
- Pronounced aromatic character
- Sweet finish after fermentation
How it is used
- Used where an aromatic lift was wanted in an otherwise plain blend.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made alone occasionally, on the strength of the aroma. There is no structure behind it.
About Pine
A pineapple in eighteenth-century England was an extraordinary object: grown in heated pits at great expense, displayed rather than eaten, and used as the standard reference for the highest possible quality in a fruit. Attaching Pine or Pineapple to a homegrown variety was a way of saying it was as good as fruit got, and the name was applied liberally to apples, pears, strawberries and gooseberries. It should be read as a claim about status, not as a tasting note.
The pear itself is low in acid, low in tannin and distinctly aromatic. That aroma is real and is what the naming was reaching for, though whether it resembles pineapple is a question about perception rather than about the fruit. In a blend it supplies scent to pears that have none.
Because the name was used generically, records referring to a Pine or Pineapple pear cannot be relied on to mean this cultivar. That is a familiar problem in this file, and the appropriate response is to say so rather than to assume continuity.
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. Pine is short for pineapple, a fruit that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the standard reference point for an exceptional flavour, and the name was applied to a good many English fruits.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Pineapple | Disputed identity | Pine in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fruit naming is short for pineapple, and both forms are recorded for this pear. Whether every tree called Pineapple is this cultivar is not established. |
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.
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.
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.
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.
- What temperature should cider ferment at — Most cider is fermented cool, commonly between about 12 and 18 °C. Cooler ferments keep more fruit aroma and run slower; above the low twenties the cider tends towards hot, solvent-like higher alcohols.
- 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.
Gloucestershire Orchard Trust · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.