Celtic Orchards, Irish Times Article
The following article by Frank McNally was
published in the Irish Times.
An Irishman's Diary
Growing
up with your own orchard, as Frank McNally did, you tend to take
apples for granted.
Ours was an old orchard and the varieties in it must have been
even older. But I barely recall what any of them were now, and
the trees are no longer around to jog my memory.
The name Beauty of Bath still lingers, probably because it was
the earliest of the early-season varieties. Impatient for
autumn, the children of the house would have resorted to eating
poisonously bitter crab apples before the Beauty of Bath took us
out of our suffering in early August. Even then, it still being
the height of summer, you always had to fight off wasps for
every bite.
It's a glorious thing to have an orchard. Long before
environmentalists preached that food should be eaten as close to
its source as possible, I was adopting this approach with
apples. Many's the happy time I spent reclining among the upper
branches, simultaneously enjoying the fruit and the view.
It was a great place to skip farm-work, although there was
always the cover story that you were in fact performing look-out
duty, watching for town boys bent on thievery. That was the one
drawback of having your own orchard, in fact. You never
experienced the thrill of robbing one.
Whatever about Beauties of Bath, I'm fairly sure I never saw or
met any Pink Ladies in our orchard, though you meet them
everywhere else these days. Well, not quite everywhere, as I
have recently discovered.
I first met the Pink Lady in a Marks and Spencers store a couple
of years back. It was infatuation at first sight. Her voluptuous
shape, her blushing complexion, that impossibly perfect skin.
You wanted to bite her right there and then (although you
couldn't because, as usual in M&S, she was covered in
unnecessary packaging).
The taste lived up to the appearance, however. After years of
eating bland apples that were certified free of flavour, this
was a revelation. It even lived up to the price, which was in
the neighbourhood of €1 per apple. The texture was strikingly
firm. And it was so sweet, you had to remind yourself that it
was also wholesome.
In short, the PL was an exciting discovery - and a chance one,
or so I flattered myself for a while. Then I realised the whole
thing was a honey trap. In reality, I had been targeted by a
carefully planned marketing operation.
Bred in Australia, a cross between Golden Delicious and Lady
Williams, the Pink Lady has been created and aggressively
promoted as a premium apple. Everything about it is controlled.
It is grown under licence, and only its perfect specimens are
sold as PLs. Most of the crop goes to market as the non-premium
"Cripps Pink".
Worryingly - from my point of view - the particular targets of
the marketing campaign are women. Young women, especially. The
PL is more than just an apple. It is that dreaded thing: a
lifestyle choice. They promote it in the glossy magazines,
apparently. And the calculated approach is paying off, with
rapid penetration of European markets.
I still like the PL, although knowing what I now know, I feel a
bit used. So more recently, I've been buying another kind of
apple - this time Irish. It's a group of apples, really - all
red, and all marketed under the name Celtic Orchards. This too
is a branding exercise, of course, complete with the packaging.
But in some respects, Celtic Orchard apples are the opposite of
Pink Ladies. They tend to be bumpier in shape. They come with
the odd skin blemish. And the texture is very noticeably softer.
But the main thing is they taste like apples ought to, and once
did. I was sufficiently impressed to track down Cornelius Traas,
a spokesman for CO, to find out more.
A Tipperary-born son of Dutch parents, Traas explained that the
Celtic Orchards label was devised two years ago because some
imported apples were being passed off as Irish in shops. There
are only about 40 commercial growers left here, he said, many
supplying only local markets. CO is an umbrella group for a
handful of producers in the southern counties who supply the
Supervalu and Superquinn chains.
There's nothing particularly Irish about the varieties, he
admits. They range from the early-season Red Windsor (actually
German) to the late Jonagored. But Irish-grown apples contain
only about half the cells of those grown in hotter countries, so
for good or bad, their texture will always be much less dense.
It is a world away from Pink Ladies to the situation that once
existed in Ireland, when small orchards proliferated and people
grew whatever varieties they could get their hands on. Wasps
were the main competition in the apple sector then. But that
Garden of Eden ended with EEC accession. The mighty French apple
industry soon swept all before it, while the southern hemisphere
filled any gaps in the year-round supply.
Now, thanks to climate change, the wheel is turning again. Not
only are the days of flying horticultural produce half-way
around the planet numbered. Ironically, global warming also
means it is getting easier to grow apples in Ireland.
This is a very mixed blessing, Traas knows. If he could, he
would stop the temperatures where they are now. But he can't.
And as long as climate change remains a reality, Irish
apple-growing looks set for a return to something like what it
was before the forces of globalisation robbed the orchard.
© 2007 The Irish Times