Apple Review #24: Winesap

I keep coming back to the question of why I do this, and while the easiest answer is, I like apples and I want you to like apples too, and I find them interesting, and I want you to find them interesting too, I’ve come to the realization that there’s another reason, too–

Things are, I’d argue, really bad right now. Things are often bad in the world, because history is full of sinister forces, but right now in particular feels keenly, sharply bad. Like, every week is a brand new re-do of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” I’m not going to go through the list, because doing so would probably take me hours, and by the time I was done writing it, a new list of abhorrent news would replace the former list of aberrations and atrocities, but suffice to say:

It’s not good, Bob.

But apples, well, apples are good. They are a simple thing. An elegant thing. They are a very nice product of the intersection of nature doing nature things and human beings doing human being things. (And on this front, I gotta recommend you read Sally Coulthard’s The Apple, A Delicious History. Thanks very much to my friends at The Montana Book Company for sending it along!) Apples are a nice thing, and it’s nice to have a nice thing in a not-so-nice time. Also great to have a simple thing in complicated times. A good thing, in evil times.

And for me this act of taking an apple, eating it, thinking about it, then talking/writing about it is honestly meditative. I’ll do the video review of the first bites, but then I’ll often walk outside with the apple and wander around, eating it. And while eating it, I’m trying to be mindful about eating it — what is it like, what do I taste, what weird flavors are nested in there, what is the texture, the aroma, what is an apple, am I turning into an apple, if I turned into an apple, what apple would I be? I enjoy the weather. I listen to the birds. I eat the apple. And as such, I get to unplug from reality for a moment and… plug back into a really-real reality. A better, nicer, truer reality, where apples exist, untethered from this troubled timeline. It’s not disassociating, not entirely. I’m not unpinning my mind from everything. I am simply pinning it to something pure, something essential, and above all else, something small. The humble, weird, wonderful apple.

Anyway. I’ve little advice for this current era, really, but had I something to tell you it’d be that: find you that thing that lets you disconnect. Something very explicitly not on a screen. Books, obviously, are wonderful for this. But it can be anything. Fish in a fishtank. Building a little terrarium. Cataloguing bugs. Birds, too–birds are a good one for me. None of this is advocating for not keeping up with the news and remaining active in action and advocacy and activism, I just mean, we all need to take time in the eye of the hurricane, in that place of calm, and maybe, just maybe, eat a fucking apple.

And now, a review.

My review of the Winesap apple, from Manoff Orchard, PA, late-Oct:

This is, in theory, a nice little apple. Kind of a Bob Ross apple — plain-spoken, maybe not entirely exciting, but contains hidden depths of wisdom and, perhaps, a secret squirrel. I’ve heard it referred to as vinous, which is to say, winey, though I found it to be less wine and more white grape with a little elderflower in there. That flavor isn’t particularly strong, though — it’s not so thin as to be the ghost of flavor, but it’s really quite mild. Unassertive, pretty chill, doesn’t want to get in your way, might be high on edibles.

Crisp. Juicy. I’d call it medium-grained. An easy eater. Except. Except.

We gotta talk about the skin.

(“I’ll take THINGS SERIAL KILLERS SAY for $500, Alex.”)

The skin.

This goddamn skin.

I bit into it — video here, which is actually a double-review of this and the Stayman Winesap — and found the skin was easily the toughest, worst skin I’ve had in my mouth. Maybe worse than the knobbed russet skin. It was like chewing wallpaper. You could line the fucking Space Shuttle in this shit to prevent space debris or to insulate it from the fiery heat of reentry. The skin is a nightmare. I think I’m still chewing it. I think I’m still digesting it. It may now be adhering to the insides of my stomach and bowels. My new interior skin.

Anyway, it was horrible, and it kind of ruins an otherwise nice-ish apple.

As such, I would’ve given this a nice score in the 5 outta 10 space, but dinging it down to nice-ish thanks to that fucking extraterrestrial ARMOR it wears, so we’ll call it *taps a bunch of numbers into an adding machine like I’m Sam Reich running a game of Make Some Noise* 4.9 out of 10.

Winesap: A chill white wine spritzer of an apple clad in the armor of an M1 Abrams tank

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, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz