Winnal’s 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 cider will be.

A firm, astringent juice with real acidity behind it, giving a perry that has grip and can be kept rather than drunk young.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Winnal’s Longdon, 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 Winnal’s 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.

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

Late 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

Early October. The fruit hangs a little longer than the early pears, and the tannin is at its most useful when the fruit is gathered promptly rather than left to soften on the ground. The National Perry Pear Collection records it ripening in the first half of October at Hartpury, which agrees with the window recorded here.

Large trees, slow into bearing, alternating once mature.

Short, though the firmer flesh gives a slightly wider margin than a Moorcroft or a Thorn.

Mid-season. Self-incompatible. The National Perry Pear Collection places it in the late 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

• Firm acidity with substantial tannin
• Astringent rather than bitter
• Slower to mature than low-tannin perry pears

How it is used

• Blended into softer perries to give them structure and the capacity to keep.
• Made single-variety by makers who want a perry with grip.

On its own

About Winnal’s 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.

Why it matters

• One of a small number of perry pears capable of producing a perry with structure and ageing capacity rather than an early-drinking one.

Related cultivars

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

• Often confused with

  Red Longdon

  Four cultivars share the Longdon parish name and orchard records rarely distinguish them.

• Often confused with

  White Longdon

  As above; the colour terms are less reliable than they sound.

• Often confused with

  Yellow Longdon

  As above.

• Similar role

  Butt

  Both are used to bring tannin and structure to a blend that would otherwise be light.

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.

• Barland

  One of the oldest named English perry pears, associated with Bosbury in Herefordshire and recorded in seventeenth-century writing, giving a markedly tannic perry that was once famous by name.

• Butt

  A late, very tannic Herefordshire perry pear whose juice ferments slowly and whose perry needs time, and one of the few that can carry a blend on its own.

• Flakey Bark

  A very late Herefordshire perry pear named for the peeling bark of the tree, and among the cultivars that came closest to being lost.

• Gregg’s Pit

  A Herefordshire perry pear named after the Much Marcle holding where the original tree still stands, and one of the few perry pears whose parent tree can be visited.

• Grüne Pichelbirne

  The sharpest Austrian perry pear measured at Klosterneuburg, and one of the most phenolic — an Upper Austrian variety first recorded in 1822 whose must the trial found sharpest of eleven.

• Hendre Huffcap

  The most highly regarded of the Huffcap group of perry pears, taking its first name from a Monmouthshire farm and its second from a word for a drink strong enough to lift a hat.

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.

• Sparkling perry

  Perry carrying a persistent bubble, a presentation that suits pear’s aromatics and residual sorbitol and has a documented history going back to the seventeenth century.

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.
• Does cider get better with age — Some does. Tannic, dry, bottle-conditioned ciders and ice ciders can gain for several years. Light, fruit-driven and commercially filtered ciders lose their aroma and do not gain anything in exchange.
• 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
• 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.

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