Foxwhelp

About the plant

The Woolhope Club began its Pomona with the apple that had made Herefordshire's name. The Foxwhelp is a cider apple, small, striped dark red and far too sharp to eat, but its juice, fermented, made the finest cider of the seventeenth century; John Evelyn's Pomona of 1664 praised it, and Foxwhelp cider sold in London at the price of a good French wine. By the 1870s the old trees were dying and few had been replanted, and the Club's first plate was a plea as much as a record: Alice Ellis painted the fruit on the branch with its blossom, and Dr Bull's text set out its history and begged the county's farmers to graft it again.

Cider apples are sorted by taste into sharps, sweets, bittersweets and bittersharps, and the Foxwhelp is the classic bittersharp, the one that gives a blend its backbone. The fruit was gathered late, left in heaps to sweat and soften, milled and pressed, and the juice fermented through the winter in barrels in the farmhouse cellar. It is still grown, and a Foxwhelp single-variety cider still tastes, the growers say, of the fox.