Stone Fruit Tasting in Hickman, CA

I was privy to an eclectic 3-hour invitation-only stone fruit tasting at Dave Wilson Nursery in Hickman, CA which felt a little like Alice stumbling into fruit wonderland.

It was a blind taste exercise where we were presented with 30 tree ripened fruit at room temperature (stone fruit are best enjoyed at room temperature when the volatile aromatic compounds provide the indelible floral, violet-like, and fruity bouquet) and were asked to provide feedback on each using a score card to rate key characteristics like Visual appeal of the fruit, Ripeness, Texture, Acidity/Tartness, Sweetness and Flavour besides an Overall rating.

Stone fruits of the prunus genus include peaches, plums, cherries, apricots, and nectarines and grafts/hybrids like aprium, pluot, cherum, pluerry, nectar plum etc. Central Valley in California is home to some of the most extensive farms of such stone fruit in the world.

 

Some of the fruit variaties we tasted are still under development so it was important for the orchard to get consumer feedback before they invest more in the mass production of saplings.

 

This event opened my eyes to a lot of nuances to stone fruit taste. There is a very fine balance almost like a tightrope walk between high sugar content and a sharp, bright acidity - that separates the winners from the losers.

  
Texture dictates how the flavour is delivered to your palate. In peaches and specific plums, the cell walls break down completely, releasing a sudden, luxurious flood of juice, whereas in cherries or specific nectarines there is a more controlled release of flavour

Plums and Apricots feature a dramatic contrast — the flesh may be deeply sweet and floral, while the skin carries a sharp, tangy tartness that cuts through the sugar.

When you start selective grafting for different hybrids you end up with mind boggling possibilities. Nature too, ever the ultimate creator, throws up a random 'sport' or 'bud sport' branch - which is naturally occurring genetic mutation that looks and behaves differently from the rest of the parent tree. When a sport branch is found to have desirable traits, orchardists will take cuttings from it to graft onto compatible rootstock, effectively cloning the mutation to create an entirely new fruit variety.

The surprise and delight of the event had to be an under-development cherry/plum hybrid - it was the shape, size and texture of a plum with the colour and sweetness of a red cherry. Mouth-watering.

I learned something new about stone fruits, evolution provided a unique way to prevent self-fertilisation in the wild. The female pistil produces a specific protein (an enzyme called an RNAse) that breaks down the genetic code of incoming pollen. If the pollen grain comes from the same tree — or from a different tree of the exact same variety — the codes match. The pistil recognises it as "self" and triggers a biochemical attack, literally destroying the pollen before it can reach the ovary. No fertilisation happens, and no fruit forms. Selective breeding through grafting has addressed this problem and created self-pollinating varieties in some but not all cases. Therefore when growing a stone fruit one has to be aware of the need for a pollinator companion or you will end up with little or no produce. 
 

Next time to sink your teeth into a juicy stone fruit remember that invisible orchardists and tasters who have done their homework to bring it to your palate.