Harvest
Windfall management
Deciding which fruit that has reached the orchard floor can be used, and getting the rest out of the crop before it becomes a patulin problem.
Also called Handling drops, Ground fruit management.
- Stage
- Harvest
- Traditional in
- No single tradition — used wherever it suits
- What it most changes
- Not recorded as moving a sensory dimension
- Safety
- Carries a safety consideration — see below
Fruit carrying soft brown rot must be excluded from the crop, not trimmed and used. Patulin produced by Penicillium expansum migrates into flesh that still looks sound, survives the acidity of juice and survives pasteurisation, so the only effective control is keeping the affected fruit out. Regulators including EFSA and Codex set limits for patulin in apple juice and juice-containing products; check the limit that applies in your jurisdiction and to your product type rather than working to a remembered figure. See the patulin control record.
What it is
The set of decisions and passes that separate usable ground fruit from fruit that has been down too long. Not all fruit on the floor is a windfall in the problematic sense: in traditions that shake the tree or wait for natural drop, the entire crop reaches the ground on purpose and is gathered promptly. The problem fruit is what came down early and lay — knocked off by a gale, shed at the June drop, dropped because of scab, canker or codling damage, or simply missed by a gathering pass. That fruit has wounds, and it has had time.
Why it is used
- Ground fruit is real tonnage in a poor year, and a maker who discards all of it may be throwing away sound crop alongside the unusable.
- Fruit that has lain long enough to develop soft brown lesions carries Penicillium expansum and the patulin it produces, which is the most serious food-safety issue in cider making.
- Rotting drops left in the orchard sustain inoculum and attract vinegar flies that carry acetic acid bacteria and Hanseniaspora into the next gathering pass.
- Separating early drops from the main gathering keeps the decision honest, because once bad fruit is mixed into a full bin nobody can take it out again at any sensible cost.
How it works
- Penicillium expansum is a wound pathogen: intact cuticle excludes it, but a bruise that has split the skin, a stalk-pull tear or an insect entry hole lets it establish, and it then macerates tissue outward from the entry point using its own pectinases.
- Patulin is a secondary metabolite produced by the growing colony, and it is not confined to the visibly rotten tissue — it diffuses into apparently sound flesh around the lesion, which is why cutting the brown part out of a fruit does not make it safe.
- The compound is stable to the acidity of apple juice and to normal pasteurisation, so no downstream heat step in a juice line removes it.
- Fermentation degrades patulin substantially, which is why unfermented juice is the higher-risk product — but the extent of the reduction depends on the ferment and it is not a control measure a maker can rely on in place of excluding the fruit.
The chemistry and the organisms
What is actually being changed, and by what. Each entry says what that compound or organism does in cider generally; this page is one place it does it.
Compounds involved
Organisms involved
Penicillium expansum
The blue mould of stored apples and the principal producer of patulin, the one genuine chemical safety issue that rotten cider fruit raises.
Monilinia fructigena
The brown rot of apples and pears, recognisable by concentric rings of buff pustules, and a major cause of fruit loss between the orchard and the mill.
Botrytis cinerea
Grey mould: a broad-host-range fruit rot whose laccase enzyme oxidises phenolics and whose glucans make a juice difficult to clarify.
Acetobacter aceti
An acetic acid bacterium that oxidises ethanol to acetic acid wherever cider meets air, and the organism behind most volatile acidity in cider.
What it is done with
The apple washer and the flotation tank
Cider fruit is gathered off the orchard floor, so it arrives with soil, grass, stones and rot attached; a flotation tank separates the fruit from the stones by density alone, and a spray or brush stage takes off what floating will not.
Bulk bins, crates and pallets
Fruit arrives in sacks, crates or bulk bins, and the container decides how deep the fruit sits, how well it breathes, how long it can wait and how it will be tipped — which makes it a quality decision as well as a handling one.
What can go wrong
Faults that begin at this step, or that this step makes more likely. Each one is set out with its causes and whether it can be put right.
Patulin contamination
Contamination of juice or cider with patulin, a mycotoxin produced by Penicillium expansum in rotting apples — a genuine food-safety question rather than a flavour one.
Mould taint
Musty, earthy, cellar-damp or rotten-fruit character carried in from mouldy fruit or from mouldy equipment, and a marker that the patulin question needs asking.
Volatile acidity
The measurable fraction of acidity that can be steam-distilled off, dominated by acetic acid and read as vinegar sharpness in the nose and a hard, hot finish.
Vinegar fly contamination
Small flies carrying acetic acid bacteria and spoilage yeasts directly into juice and cider, and depositing them wherever they land.
Starch haze
A persistent haze caused by starch carried in from under-ripe fruit, which has not yet been converted to sugar and stays suspended in the cider.
Styles it produces
Categories in which this step is characteristic or required. Some name it in their definition; for others it is simply how they have always been made.
More on windfall management
The judgement is easier to state than to make, because the visible signal lags the chemistry. A fruit whose skin is unbroken and whose flesh is firm has almost certainly not been colonised however long it has been lying; a fruit with a soft brown lesion, however small, has a fungus growing in it and a diffusion gradient of patulin extending well beyond what the eye can see. Between those two is a large population of fruit with skin splits, bruise cracks, wasp holes and stalk tears that may or may not have taken. Practical management therefore works on the population rather than the individual: a separate pass for early drops, a shorter interval between fall and gathering, and a willingness to leave a block that has been down through a warm wet week rather than gather it into the same bins as sound fruit.
Traditions differ in how much of the crop is legitimately ground fruit, and that difference is often misread as a difference in tolerance for rot. In Asturias and the Basque Country the whole harvest is gathered from the floor, and in Normandy and the West Country most of it is; none of those traditions regards mouldy fruit as acceptable, and the historical practice of pressing whatever came to hand belongs to an era with no analytical method and different expectations rather than to a defensible modern standard. What genuinely varies is the gathering interval a tradition considers normal, and the extent to which the crop is expected to soften before milling — a maker sweating fruit deliberately has to be stricter about what goes into the heap than one milling on the day of gathering, because the heap gives any established colony weeks to work.
The failure mode is dilution thinking: the belief that a small proportion of rotten fruit disappears into a large volume of juice. It does not disappear; it contributes its patulin to the batch, and because a heavily rotted fruit can carry a great deal of it, a small mass fraction of the crop can dominate the result. The same reasoning fails for aroma, since mould-tainted fruit contributes musty, earthy notes that survive fermentation and are not removed by fining or filtration. Left in the orchard, rotting drops are also a reservoir: they overwinter inoculum, feed the vinegar-fly population that transfers Acetobacter onto wounded fruit, and make next season’s problem slightly worse than this one.
Related processes
Steps that sit alongside this one, replace it, or depend on it having been done.
Harvest
Fruit sorting
Taking rotten, mouldy and damaged fruit and foreign material out of the crop before it reaches the mill, which is the primary control on patulin in cider.
Juice treatment
Patulin control
Managing the mycotoxin produced by rot fungi in damaged apples, which is controlled by fruit selection rather than by any treatment applied to juice.
Harvest
Shaking and collecting
Bringing fruit down with a pole or letting it fall, then gathering it from the orchard floor — the traditional way most cider and perry fruit has always been harvested.
Fruit preparation
Fruit washing
Removing soil, grass, stones and surface contamination from gathered fruit, usually in a water flume, before it reaches the mill.
Harvest
Fruit storage before milling
Holding a gathered crop between harvest and the mill, and managing what respiration, water loss and spoilage do to it while it waits.
Orchard
Pest and disease management
Keeping scab, canker, rots and the main insect pests to a level the orchard can carry, at a cosmetic standard well below dessert fruit but without allowing rot into the crop.
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 do cider makers keep patulin out — By sorting rotten fruit out before milling, because patulin comes from moulds growing on damaged apples. Fermentation reduces what gets through, so fermented cider carries no limit where juice does.
- Can you fix a cider that has gone vinegary — Not really. Volatile acidity cannot be removed at small scale, and blending it away only dilutes it. The realistic options are to accept it, to blend a lightly affected batch into a much larger sound one, or to let it finish becoming vinegar.
- What turns cider into vinegar — Acetic acid bacteria oxidising ethanol, in two steps that both consume oxygen. This is why acetification is an air problem: a full sealed vessel does not acetify however many bacteria it contains.
- How long can apples be kept before pressing
- Why do cider apples need washing, and how is it done
- Does cider contain patulin — Patulin comes from mouldy fruit and is regulated in apple juice. Fermentation reduces it substantially, so fermented cider carries far less risk than unfermented juice made from the same fruit.
Where to go next
- How cider is made — The whole sequence, stage by stage, with the choices open at each one.
- Cider science — The chemistry and microbiology the methods on this page rest on.
- Troubleshooting — What goes wrong, how to recognise it, and whether it can be reversed.
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.
European Food Safety Authority scientific opinions
EFSA · regulator · retrieved 2026-08-24
Registered for the food-safety questions cider genuinely raises: patulin in juice from rotten fruit, sulphite sensitivity, and the toxicology behind additive limits.
The Science of Cidermaking and associated technical writing
Andrew Lea · reference work · passage verified 2026-08-24
Written by a food chemist who worked at Long Ashton on apple phenolics. Unusual among specialist cider writing in that it is primary-research-adjacent: the author is describing work he did, and cites the literature. This is why it is registered at tier 1 for chemistry while a general cider book is not.
Cider and perry production technical training material
Peter Mitchell / Cider and Perry Academy · reference work · registered as competent for this subject
Searched again on 2026-08-25 and it remains the one printed source here that a bibliographic check cannot fix, because it is not a published work with an edition. It is course material issued to participants of a training programme, so there is no catalogue record to verify, no ISBN, and no lawful public copy. Its state stays `registered` for that reason rather than through inattention.
Codex Alimentarius food standards
FAO / WHO · standards body · retrieved 2026-08-24