Dataset

The Virginia polyphenol characterisation

Twenty apple cultivars — mostly dessert and processing fruit, with Harrison among them — measured by one laboratory in one place with one method, which makes it the cleanest evidence on the site for what separates a cider apple from an eating apple.

How much more phenolic material does a cider apple carry than an eating apple?

On this evidence, four to five times as much as the next fruit in the set and more than four times a Golden Delicious. Harrison comes out at 926 mg/L total polyphenols against a next-highest of 415 and a Golden Delicious of 218, in twenty cultivars measured by one laboratory in one place with one method.

The composition of the set is the value. Most of the twenty are dessert or processing apples and only Harrison — and arguably Newtown Pippin and Black Twig — has much claim to being cider fruit, so the comparison is built into the dataset rather than assembled across sources.

The programme

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

Site: Winchester, in the northern Shenandoah Valley, Virginia
Period: 2012–2013
Cultivars transcribed: 17
Measurements: 68
Values withheld: None
Classifies under: No classification scheme

Climate. Humid subtropical shading into continental, with hot summers — warm enough that acid falls faster through the ripening period than it does in a maritime autumn, which is part of why the titratable acidities here run lower than English figures for comparable fruit.

Method. Soluble solids by refractometer, pH by meter, titratable acidity by titration as malic acid, total polyphenols by Folin–Ciocalteu as gallic acid equivalents. Twenty cultivars, one site.

What the source says about itself

Chosen deliberately to span cider, processing and dessert fruit, which makes it the site’s best single answer to what separates the three. The figures reach CiderHQ through a specialist transcription of the published table; the paper itself is registered and its identity verified.

What it adds

One method across a deliberately mixed set. Comparisons between cider and dessert fruit usually have to cross two laboratories and two conventions; here they do not.
It is peer-reviewed, which most of the corpus is not.
It measures a warm-climate site, where acid falls faster through ripening than it does in a maritime autumn — part of why the titratable acidities run lower than English figures for comparable fruit.

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.

Two seasons at one site in the northern Shenandoah Valley.
The phenolic figures are Folin–Ciocalteu in gallic acid equivalents, the modern convention, and are not what Long Ashton measured. Every reading carries that warning.
The figures reach CiderHQ through a specialist transcription of the published table rather than from the paper itself, which is registered but not opened.

Why these figures are not universal

Harrison at 926 mg/L is Harrison in Virginia in 2012 and 2013. The same cultivar reads 960 mg/L at Geneva by a different assay and carries 0.10% permanganate tannin in the Skagit Valley, and none of the three numbers converts into either of the others. What travels from this dataset is the ratio between the fruits it measured, not the absolute value of any one of them.

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 17 cultivars in The Virginia polyphenol characterisation
Property	Cultivars	Reported in
Brix	17	Degrees Brix
pH	17	pH
Titratable acidity	17	Grams per litre
Total phenolics	17	Milligrams per litre

Total phenolics across every cultivar in this dataset that carries it — 17 of them, from 926 down to 211 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
Harrison	926
Black Twig	415
Enterprise	398
Winesap	373
Granny Smith	361
GoldRush	359
Jonagold	301
Red Delicious	300
Rome Beauty	288
Newtown Pippin	267
Stayman Winesap	253
Arkansas Black	241
Fuji	238
Idared	229
Golden Delicious	218
York Imperial	215
Cripps Pink	211

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 Virginia polyphenol characterisation may be read in one column with the site’s other datasets
Dataset	Verdict	Why
The USDA-PGRU germplasm characterisation	Not comparable	Folin–Ciocalteu against Löwenthal permanganate. Both report total phenolics in milligrams per litre and the numbers look directly comparable, which is exactly why the warning is attached to every reading.
The Long Ashton cider apple table	Not comparable	A reader comparing 926 mg/L against a Long Ashton 0.64% permanganate figure is comparing two assays that respond to different molecules.

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.

Characterization of the Polyphenol Composition of 20 Cultivars of Cider, Processing, and Dessert Apples (Malus × domestica Borkh.) Grown in Virginia
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry · peer-reviewed literature · retrieved 2026-08-25 · covers 2012–2013
Twenty cultivars spanning cider, processing and dessert fruit, measured by one laboratory with one method — which makes it the cleanest evidence CiderHQ holds for what actually separates a cider apple from an eating apple. Harrison reaches 926 mg/L total phenolics against a Golden Delicious of 218. The published table reached CiderHQ through a specialist transcription rather than from the journal itself, which is recorded as a gap; the paper’s bibliographic identity, authorship and DOI were verified against the Crossref register on 2026-08-25 — which caught a transcription error in the DOI CiderHQ had first recorded, and is the reason the register is checked rather than assumed.