The Lady Alice: An Exclusive

This morning, Rebekah Denn tweeted (Twittered? Tweetled? Oh you kids and your newfangled lingo) a link to an article in the Columbus Journal-Dispatch about Lady Alice, an apple variety whose grower is trying to control the right to grow it. I read the story and thought, hunh, I just picked up one of those at QFC yesterday.

According to Robin Davis's article, Rainier Fruit in Selah obtained the original Lady Alice from the person who discovered it as a chance seedling. The normal way for apple-variety developers (who knew?) to profit off their labor has to sell cuttings of the tree to any farm that wanted to grow it. Rainier Fruit, instead, is marketing the apple itself to make sure the prices stay high -- and selling to selected stores (in Seattle, QFC and Fred Meyer), limiting the release to 2-4 weeks in the early spring.

It's one thing to enjoy paging through seed catalogs -- and I devotedly taste every single heritage variety Jones Creek Farm brings to my farmers market -- but I'm not sure if I want to buy into a brand, complete with its own logo. There's already one Apple in my life.

As for the fruit: The article says that the Lady Alice late-release date was chosen because the apple cellars so well. And the exterior of the one I bought was firm and sheer even in March, without that slight dimpling that most of the other North American apples have right now. The taste was sweet (without being insipidly so), and the apple had a nice snap. But there was a weirdly mossy aftertaste to mine that reminded me of a wine with very faint cork taint. I finished the apple, but grudgingly. I don't care if Galas are overexposed, I'm sticking with them until it's heritage apple season again.