Apple Review #34: Ananas Reinette

I think one of the other things I really like about apples is that once in a while you eat one that makes you really feel alive. What I mean is, there’s something about the moment where you bite into it where you’re given a hard shove out of this reality and into the reality of the apple. For a precious moment, you lose sight of everything. All there is, is the apple. Its taste. Its texture. The joy it gives. It’s like a slap to the face, except in a good way? (Usually. Some apples are called “spitters” for a reason, after all.) Certainly apples aren’t the only thing that does this — there are experiences in life that accomplish this in ways bigger and smaller. First kiss, a car accident, someone tells you that they love you for the first time, a moment at a concert where the band plays your favorite song or a song you never really appreciated before that moment — I think there are a lot of really fascinating moments that perforate the expected expanse of our daily lives, and it’s really great when they happen, and honestly, to my mind, they happen less and less as you get older. Perhaps there’s just a loss of novelty — little is new, everything is some degree of comfort. Even your anxieties can start to feel like an old enemy rather than a brand new monster. But sometimes you still get it. And for me, sometimes the way I get it is by eating a really new, interesting apple.

Which leads me to —

My review of an Ananas Reinette from Scott Farm (VT), early-Nov:

The Ananas Reinette — translated from the French, the Pineapple Pippin, and “pippin” is basically just “apple,” so it’s a pineapple apple, and if you placed that apple between two pens, it’d be pen pineapple apple pen, so enjoy that earworm. You’re goddamn welcome.

(Weirdly, it’s got a French name, but it’s a Dutch apple — a roughly 500-year-old apple, originating in the Netherlands. In Dutch, then, it should be ananas appel. I am unsure why it has a French name, then? I blame one of you.)

Anyway.

I really like a tart apple.

Not just tart — but really tart, and really sweet.

I like it because of exactly what I outlined at the fore of this post — sweetness on its own is not likely to do much work jarring me from my gestalt, but if you add in a whip-crack acid-lick of tartness in there? Oh, my world, she is shook.

And this apple has exactly that.

The first flavor out of the gate is a pretty intense pineapple-lemon-pear slap to the mouth. And it’s great. The kind of pain that is pleasure. You get that lip-smacker sour-patch thing, and it’s also got that tongue-scrubbing tastebud buzz, like what you’d get from eating pineapple. It’s wild. It’s crazy. It’s a blast of flavor and it will give you that short, sharp spiritual shock that will rattle your soul out of drudgery and ennui.

It’s crisp. Pretty juicy. Medium-to-finely grained. And it’s a pretty apple. That bold green-yellow with the little green freckles (aka lenticels) on it? Love it.

And so now you’re going wonder, if I liked this apple so much, why am I giving it a relatively low 7.9?

Well, first, I’d note somewhat haughtily that a 7.9 out of 10 is still a very good score, I’ll have you know, and you’ll respond with, “Well if it were a grade in school, it’d be a C+,” and I’ll respond with, “Grades are bad and silly and measure nothing of value and don’t even really make sense on that 1-100 scale,” and you’d tell me I was stalling, and okay yeah maybe.

The reason I’m not quite ready to commit my heart to a higher score here is just because at the end of it, there was a grassy aftertaste and then an afteraftertaste which was a little metallic. I’m willing to believe it’s just a fluke — also willing to believe that this apple just needs more time in storage, which is totally a thing with this one. You let it go a little longer in cold storage, and it’ll ideally lose that green-grass vibe. But for now, this specimen of this apple, I gotta go 7.9 / 10.

SORRY, PINEAPPLE APPLE, I LOVE YOU.

Watch me eat it here.

Ananas Reinette: Flavor taser