Red Longdon

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 drink will be.

Red-flushed fruit giving a juice that dries the mouth without much sharpness behind it.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Red Longdon. Perry pears have been described far less than they have been analysed, and much of what a perry smells of is 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 Red Longdon 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.

Where it sits among the varieties each programme measured

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

Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping

Cropping

Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate

Keeping

Poor — mill soon after picking

Late September into October. As with the rest of the Longdon group the window is short and the fruit is milled promptly. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in the first half of October at Hartpury, which agrees with the 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.

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, appreciable tannin
• Astringent finish
• Coloured juice from the skin flush

How it is used

• Blended for tannin with sharper Three Counties fruit.
• Grown in the Longdon district alongside the other pears of the name.

On its own

About Red Longdon

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.

Related cultivars

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

• Often confused with

  Winnal’s Longdon

  The four Longdons are routinely conflated in orchard records.

• Often confused with

  White Longdon

  As above.

• Often confused with

  Yellow Longdon

  As above.

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.

• Antricotin

  A tannic Domfrontais poiré pear used to give structure to blends led by the region’s softer aromatic fruit.

• Coppy

  A tannic perry pear of the Welsh border country, known from few trees and giving a juice with unusual grip for its class.

• Red Pear

  A tannic Herefordshire perry pear whose generic name has been applied to red-fruited pears generally, making orchard records that use it almost impossible to interpret.

• Harley Gum

  A Herefordshire perry pear whose name records a gum exuded by the tree, and one of the more distinctive names in a fruit full of them.

• Nailer

  A tannic perry pear of the Forest of Dean and north Worcestershire country, whose name is generally taken to record the nail-making trade.

• De Fer

  A hard, tannic Domfrontais poiré pear whose name — iron — describes the fruit exactly.

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.

• 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
• What is maceration in cider making — Maceration is letting milled pomace stand before pressing, so that enzymes soften the tissue and phenolics and aroma move from the skins into the juice. It raises both colour and tannin, and raises the risk of oxidation with them.
• 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

  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 check 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.

• 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.

• Three Counties Cider and Perry Association

  TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24