Dataset

The Klosterneuburg Mostbirnen trial

Austrian perry pears analysed over two seasons at the research station’s own orchard — the best measured account of Mostviertel fruit CiderHQ has found, and reported in an acid convention nothing else on the site uses.

What is known about Austrian perry pears?

More than English-language cider writing suggests. Austria has the third of the world’s great perry pear landscapes — the Mostviertel, between the Hausruck and the Traisen — and this trial planted fourteen Austrian Mostbirnen in 2002, grew them as spindles on two rootstocks under organic rules, and analysed them over two seasons for phenols, for the individual acids, and for eleven of them as single-variety must.

Every acid figure in it carries a warning. Austrian wine law reports titratable acidity as tartaric acid and the trial follows it, where every English, French and Spanish figure on this site is reported as malic. The same juice reads roughly a quarter lower expressed as tartaric.

The programme

Transcribed from the source as published. Nothing in this panel is CiderHQ’s wording.

Site: Versuchsgut Haschhof, HBLA und Bundesamt für Wein- und Obstbau, Klosterneuburg, Lower Austria
Period: 2007–2008
Cultivars transcribed: 13
Measurements: 64
Values withheld: None
Classifies under: No classification scheme

Climate. Pannonian-influenced continental, on the Danube north-west of Vienna: warmer and markedly drier than the Mostviertel proper, which is the perry pear country these cultivars come from. The trial orchard is a research planting rather than a working Mostviertel orchard, and the difference is worth holding in mind before a figure here is read as typical of the region.

Method. Fourteen Austrian perry pear cultivars planted spring 2002 at 4 × 2 m, trained as spindles on Quince A with an interstem and on Pyrodwarf, managed to organic rules; first cropping 2006. Dissolved solids by hand refractometer in °Oechsle; titratable acidity by titration to pH 8.1 with 0.1 N sodium hydroxide, reported as tartaric acid; malic and citric acid by ion chromatography; total phenols by Folin–Ciocalteu after C18 clean-up; individual phenolics by HPLC; must alcohol, sugar and acid by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy.

What the source says about itself

Peer-reviewed and published by the institution that also runs Austria’s statutory fruit-wine analysis panel. Two things constrain it: it is a spindle trial on dwarfing rootstocks, and the Mostviertel tradition it draws its cultivars from is a standard-tree one; and its acid figures are expressed as tartaric acid rather than as malic, which is stated on every measurement here because the difference is about a quarter and is invisible in the number.

What it adds

It is the site’s only Austrian measurement programme, and the Mostviertel is otherwise represented by regulation and culture rather than by numbers.
It reports the individual acids rather than a single titration figure, which is rare on perry fruit anywhere.
It carries finished must analyses — alcoholic strength and residual sugar — for eleven varieties fermented singly, which almost nothing else on the site does for pears.

What it cannot be asked

Stated as limits rather than as apology. A dataset with known bounds is more useful than one presented as complete.

Fourteen varieties, two seasons, one orchard, on trees planted in 2002 and therefore young for perry pears — a fruit whose juice quality is known to change markedly with the age of the tree.
Spindle trees on size-controlling rootstock, which is not how traditional Mostviertel standards are grown, so the trial measures a modern orchard system rather than the landscape it belongs to.
The tartaric convention runs through every acid figure and cannot be undone by the reader without knowing the acid composition of each juice.

Why these figures are not universal

The Mostviertel is continental where the Three Counties are maritime, and the trial’s trees were young spindles rather than the century-old standards the landscape is famous for. Both differences push in the same direction, and neither is captured by a variety name. These are figures about an Austrian research orchard in 2007 and 2008.

What was measured

Every property in the transcription, with how many cultivars carry it. A property measured on some cultivars and not others is a gap in the source, not in the transcription.

Properties recorded across 13 cultivars in The Klosterneuburg Mostbirnen trial
Property	Cultivars	Reported in
Total phenolics	12	Milligrams per litre
Phenolic acids	12	Milligrams per litre
Malic acid	10	Grams per litre
Alcohol by volume	10	Percent alcohol by volume
Residual sugar	10	Grams per litre
Titratable acidity	10	Grams per litre

Total phenolics across every cultivar in this dataset that carries it — 12 of them, from 3390 down to 650 mg/L. Every figure here comes from this one programme, measured by one method in one place, which is the only arrangement under which a comparison like this is sound. Nothing on this chart may be read against another dataset’s column.
Cultivar	Total phenolics (mg/L)	Where it sits in this study’s range
Dorschbirne	3390
Knollbirne	2860
Grüne Pichelbirne	2830
Kleine Landlbirne	2450
Schweizer Wasserbirne	2300
Speckbirne	2150
Luxemburger Mostbirne	2000
Rote Pichelbirne	1750
Stieglbirne	1510
Machländer	1480
Gelbmostler	1320
Grüne Winawitz	650

Ordering only. Where a figure was published as a range the midpoint is used to place the row, and the range itself — not the midpoint — is what appears on the cultivar’s own page.

What it can be read beside

The commonest way to misuse this corpus is not to misread one figure but to put two side by side that were never measuring the same thing. This is the judgement, stated.

Whether The Klosterneuburg Mostbirnen trial may be read in one column with the site’s other datasets
Dataset	Verdict	Why
Everything else on the site	Not comparable	No acid figure here may be read beside a malic figure from elsewhere on the site. The tartaric convention is not a labelling difference; the two acids have different equivalent weights and the same juice returns a different number under each.
The Three Counties perry pear survey	Not comparable	The two modern perry pear datasets on the site, on different fruit in different climates under different conventions. Read as two accounts of what perry fruit can be, never as one table.

Where a dataset is not listed, no judgement has been recorded and the safe reading is that the two have not been checked against each other. CiderHQ never averages across studies: how evidence is handled sets out why.

Cultivars in this dataset

Each carries this programme’s figures on its own page, alongside whatever else has measured it.

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.

Prüfung ausgewählter Mostbirnensorten als Spindel unter Bio-Produktionsbedingungen
Wurm, Gössinger, Wendelin and Korntheuer, HBLA und Bundesamt für Wein- und Obstbau Klosterneuburg, in Mitteilungen Klosterneuburg 61 (2011): 236–246 · research institute · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 2002–2010
Fourteen Austrian perry pears trialled at the research station that also runs Austria’s statutory fruit-wine analysis panel. The only measured Austrian Mostbirnen data CiderHQ has found, and the first Austrian figures on the site. Its tables are scanned images with no text layer, so every figure published here was read from the rendered pages directly rather than from an extraction, and the source’s own typesetting error — Knollbirne’s residual sugar printed “3,o” — is recorded rather than normalised. The acid convention is tartaric rather than malic, which is Austrian wine law and is stated on every measurement taken from it.