Apple Review #15: Orleans Reinette

Why is it that sometimes you eat well-regarded apple but find it terrible? Or, the reverse: an apple that sucks is, to you, in that moment, good?

There are, of course, a lot of things going on. Some of it could be objective — that was a bad season for that apple, the weather was weird, there was some kind of apple disease present like cedar rust or fireblight which are both real things and not fantasy diseases, the apple’s been too long off the tree, the apple’s been not off the tree long enough, someone did not properly wassail the tree with the proper songs and blood-a-sprinkling.

And a lot of things are subjective. You wanted a sweet apple, got one that was tart. You got one that tastes too much like apple or not enough like apple. Context plays big with food — you were hungry, you were thirsty, you didn’t really want an apple, the day was cold or warm or you just broke up with your boyfriend or your boss just tried to replace you with an AI toaster oven.

Sometimes life is a filthy lens through which it’s hard to see.

The opposite can be true, too — those rose-colored glasses can make an otherwise uninteresting apple taste big, bold, refreshing, the best thing you’ve had in years. The best apple I can remember was a Jonathan apple in Fruita, Colorado — was it really the objectively greatest apple I’ve ever eaten? Probably not. But it was a good day, that day. Colorado was beautiful. My father and I were really getting along after years and years of definitely not getting along. I had my wife — not yet my wife at that point — with me. The apple was a filter for all of that.

So, you just never know why a thing resonates how it resonates. Apples in particular. Different years, different growers, different time frames, different storage applications and durations, different you, different me. Sometimes an apple you love one year won’t be one you love the next. And that’s fine. Things change. Life is chaos. We are a different person every time we wake up, the dial turning a tick this way, a tick that way, every morning a chrysalis from which we emerge.

What I’m trying to say is, let’s review an apple.

My review of Orleans Reinette from Scott Farm, VT, mid-Oct:

French apple. Over a hundred (!) alternate names. (I read off just a handful of them on the video of me eating the apple, if you care.) Earliest trackback to them seems to be 1776, so let’s assume the entire Revolutionary War was fought over these. A war over apples? I’d write that book.

Lotta people love these. Online, you’ll find “delightful treat” and “will blow your mind” and “I had to change my pants, for such a vigorous shellacking did I give them upon biting into this Edenic fruit” and I might be making that last one up but you get the drift. This apple brings the enthusiasm.

And that’s where I’m a little disappointed in eating this one.

It’s pleasing enough in appearance — I found the russeting to be kind of fascinating in that it felt almost fuzzy, like a peach. Not rough, but still soft. Squat, almost donut-shaped, or like a donut peach, and no I swear this isn’t a peach because that’s the second peach reference.

It bites like you’re calving a glacier.

Then there’s this peary-pistachio (Perry Pistachio is also my detective name, nice to meet you) thing going on followed by a softly citrus kick. There’s a faint scent of florality to it, which is nice. Is florality a word? I don’t think it is, but it should be. Anyway. All these flavors, though — well, most of it beyond the rearview, though.

It’s chewy. And the skin in particular remains in your mouth, eternally, like the restless dead, like an offended specter, just haunting the shit out of your teeth forever and ever, ever-chewed and existentially angry.

So, I’m going with “kind of disappointed.”

I feel like a 4 outta 10 is where I’m going with it.

Orleans Reinette: Squat, chewy, weird, but not all bad, the Paul Giamatti of apples, I’m just kidding, Paul Giamatti, come back

Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent