The record-breaking weather we’ve experienced throughout 2022 has impacted the harvest quality and quantity of the county’s crops, with the summer’s drought resulting in smaller vegetables than we’re used to seeing on supermarket shelves. But the conditions have proved ideal for apples, cultivating a bumper crop of delicious British apples and, hopefully, for one eight-year-old from Bristol, a record-beating fruit.
Florence Winch was having lunch at her godmother Val’s house near Pensford a few weeks ago when she spotted an unusually large apple growing on one of the old cooking apple trees in the garden. Not willing to wait for it to drop, she carefully picked the fruit, which weighs over half a kilo, and then set about trying to identify it.
Fortunately for this precocious forager, it seems the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree - her dad Patrick Winch has a background in cider manufacturing, and says he worked as a quality control tester for White Lightning, among other roles. Her grandfather Anthony Winch is also a bit of an expert in the field, being an apple collector from Herefordshire and an agriculture aid worker, who has even written a book about growing produce.
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Speaking to Bristol Live about the unusual fruit, Patrick said: “My dad, I thought, had seen every apple grown in England, but clearly not. So he took it to Herefordshire to be identified by a professional apple identifier. And they got back to us to say it was almost certainly a Howgate Wonder.”
A cross between a Newton Wonder and a Blenheim Orange, the Howgate Wonder was first raised around 1915 by a retired policeman, G. Wratten, who lived on Howgate Lane in Bembridge on the Isle of Wight. Known for its conspicuous red and orange striping, the Howgate Wonder is one of the largest cooking apples cultivated in this country. In 1997, one of the variety scooped the Guinness World as the largest apple ever grown, weighing an impressive 1.670kg.
That achievement has since been trumped by a whopping 1.849kg fruit picked by Chisato Iwasaki in 2005 at his farm in Hirosaki City, Japan. The contender from Pensford weighs in at around 0.594kg, but that hasn’t deterred Florence, who suspects that Val’s tree may yet yield a more competitive challenger.
What plans are in store for Bristol’s appealingly large and well-travelled Howgate Wonder? The variety is known for its long shelf life, often lasting well into the New Year, when the taste develops and becomes sweet enough to eat raw, but it can also be pressed, with its size meaning that only around six are needed to produce a litre of juice. However, Patrick says there is no exact plan for Florence's apple beyond perhaps a pie or two.
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