Perry pear
Potato Pear
A heavily russeted Monmouthshire perry pear whose name describes a fruit that looks like a potato, giving a mild, sweet juice.
Also written Potato, Tato Pear.
- Classification
- Sweet — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Monmouthshire
- 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, from Welsh cultivar survey work rather than published 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 | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Welsh cultivar survey description of a mild, sweet, low-acid pear.
A rough, brown-russeted fruit giving a mild, sweet juice with a faint dry edge from the heavy russet.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Potato Pear, 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
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.
Sorbitol10.0–30.0 g/L
Various growing sites; the literature pools pear juice analyses rather than reporting by orchard · Various journals and institute reports
A general pear juice figure rather than an analysis of Potato Pear. It is recorded here because a sweet-class pear with almost no acid gives the clearest demonstration of the effect: nothing in the juice masks the sorbitol, and the finished perry tastes sweet whatever the yeast has done. The range is not tied to a single study or season.
A sugar alcohol abundant in pears and largely unfermentable, which is why perry keeps a sweetness cider does not. Measured in grams per litre.
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.
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
Autumn, in the main window. The heavy russeting makes ripeness hard to judge by colour, so the fruit is taken when it begins to fall. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in the first half of October at Hartpury, which agrees with the window recorded here.
The thick russeted skin gives a little protection, but the flesh goes over on the usual timetable.
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 | low | Heavy russeting masks and to some extent resists scab. |
Juice and pressing
- Low acid, low tannin
- Mild and sweet-finishing
- Marked sorbitol sweetness after fermentation
How it is used
- A Monmouthshire farm perry pear, pressed with whatever else was ready.
- Recorded and propagated through Welsh perry pear conservation work.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made alone in small volumes. The perry is soft and finishes sweet, and the sweetness is sorbitol rather than unfermented sugar.
About Potato Pear
Potato Pear is named for exactly what it looks like: a round, rough, brown-russeted fruit that a Monmouthshire grower thought resembled a potato. Perry pear naming is frequently this direct, and the directness is part of what makes the vocabulary interesting. These names were not chosen to be memorable or marketable. They were chosen because somebody needed to tell one tree from another and reached for the first accurate description available.
The juice is mild — low in acid, low in tannin, sweet-finishing — and it gives a soft perry with no structure. Because the acidity is so low, the sorbitol that survives fermentation is entirely unmasked, and a Potato Pear perry tastes sweet regardless of how completely it has fermented. This is the effect that makes perry chemically distinct from cider, and a pear like this one is where it is most obvious.
The russeting has one practical consequence worth noting: it makes ripeness impossible to judge by colour, so the fruit is taken when it starts to come down. It also masks scab and resists it somewhat, which is a small advantage in a wet Welsh autumn.
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. The name is purely descriptive: a round, rough, brown-russeted fruit that a grower thought resembled a potato.
Why it matters
- One of the Welsh cultivars identified during survey work in Monmouthshire and Gwent, and known from few trees.
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.
Green Longdon
The senior member of the Longdon group, widely grown in north-west Gloucestershire and carrying six synonyms, three of which other Longdons also claim.
Barnet
A very late-flowering Three Counties perry pear of mild juice, carrying six recorded synonyms and one that collides with a cider apple.
Bartestree Squash
A late-ripening Herefordshire squash pear of notably low acid, and one of the mildest juices in the modern Three Counties survey.
De Cloche
A bell-shaped Domfrontais poiré pear, planted alongside Plant de Blanc and giving a mild, sweet juice.
Green Roller
An early-flowering Three Counties perry pear with the highest assimilable nitrogen recorded in the modern survey.
Arlingham Squash
A soft-fleshed perry pear from the Severn parish of Arlingham, sharing its second name with Taynton Squash without being related to it.
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.
- 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
- What is welsh 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.
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.
Marcher Apple Network · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Has rediscovered and DNA-fingerprinted a number of lost Welsh border cultivars. Cited for identity work on cultivars the national collections do not hold.
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.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.