It was a beautiful day last November 6, 2010. Thanks to the USDA staff working at the Wolfskill Experimental Nursery for conducting the fantastic pomegranate tasting event. Special thanks to various CRFG officers and volunteers who helped facilitate the event. There was also persimmon tasting, and some Dragon Fruit Cultivar and samples of Paw-paw and other fruits were also available on the sidelines for tasting. Ed Valdivia, Barbara Baer, John Valenzuela, Kioko, and many other CRFG officers and good friends were there. Harvey Correia, a good friend of mine who have one of the biggest number of pomegranate cultivars in California, grown in large trial blocks in his farm was also there and I included the evaluation of pomegranates from his farm that are not offered for tasting at the Wolfskill Experimental Nursery.


Photo by Edgar Valdivia

The event was a huge success, it was heavily attended by an international group of Pomegranate afficionados, myself included. It was a big crowd, but I was ready for the event using an excellent secret weapon for crowded tasting events such as these. I have my son, JR, once again to help me out as he can easily move in and out of the large masses of people. My daughter Katrina would have loved to come, as she enjoys pomegranate tasting and have better taste buds than I do, but I simply don't have enough time to pick her up from far-away university. So my son JR and I obtained just one tiny scoop of pomegranate arils from each cultivar, saved into the sandwhich ziploc bags, labeled and then evaluate them peacefully and leisurely without pressure, at home, just 35 minutes away from Wolfskill Nursery.


Photo by Marta Matvienko

I found time to use my trusty Refractometer, the one with Automatic Temperature Correction which I use when making wine. The most accurate reading would be from the buckets of juices that I extracted from large samples of fruits that came from Harvey Correia. I volunteered to turn his first year's pomegranate fruits into unique pomegranate wine varietals. For the first time ever, my dream of making distinct kinds of wines from various pomegranate cultivars will be realized, and Harvey plans to feature the wine at next year's Festival of Fruit in Arizona where the Pomegranate fruit will be featured. I hope to make three major types of pomegranate wine. From the blush colored types coming from low-acid pink arils to the deep dark colored wines that comes from dark colored arils that are packed with strong acids and sugars.

It was a relatively cooler summer this year, and many cultivars had higher acidity and matured later. This time, aside from evaluating the pomegranates for their potential for winemaking, I kept in mind what would be good for fresh eating, mindful that some of us would love soft seeded low acid cultivars, while I prefer a bolder, well balanced taste of sweetness, acidity and fruity aromas.

Below are the results of my lone (no daughter to settle and discuss the scoring and ranking) evaluation this time. While I can turn any kind of pomegranate fruits into delicious wines, even those that would score a zero in the wine flavor sheet shown below, the scoring of the flavors for wines simply indicates the potential for winemaking with minimum intervention. It means that the higher the score, the less work I have to do to turn their juices into fantastic wines.





And here's the pics of various pomegranate fruits at the Wolfskill Pomegranate Tasting event. My sincere thanks to Ed Valdivia for giving me permission to use his photos taken that day.









Here's my recommendations based on the results of my score sheet.
If you want to have it all, and because of limited space and would like the same cultivar for fresh eating and winemaking, here's the cultivars that I would consider to be a must have for their balanced sweetness, acidity, and soft-seededness:
Myagkosemyanyi Rosovyi, Desertnyi, Vkusnyi, Parfianka and Ariana

And if you simply loved sweetness with very little to very mild acidity and soft-seededness, features that I sometimes would intentionally seek out, depending on my mood and temperament, these cultivars would foot the bill, and when chilled, they're a delight to eat:
Sin Pepe, Fleischman's, Utah Sweet, Azadi, Myatadzhy, and Sirenevyi

And if you don't care about the seeds, would just love to seek out flavor for the purpose of making excellent wines, then here are the cultivars that would require minimum tweaking to make excellent pomegranate wine:
Gissarskii Rosovyi, Angel Red, Cranberry, Palermo, Parfianka, Ariana, Wonderful, Kara Bala Miursal


But be forewarned, the results are highly biased and could change from season to season.

thanks, there was a meeting on Pomegranate Tuesday here in the Houston area. they talked about how they are trying to develop an Pomegranate industry here in Texas.

one thing he did say was having a Pomegranate taste testing later in the year makes it hard to evaluate earlier ripening variates.

Joe, I thought last year's tasting was going to be the end of pomegranate tasting at Wolfskill, and that event was to be shut down. I knew that Harvey had added pomegranates to his chestnut farm. How many different varieties? My Wonderful pomegranate tree produced more fruit this year than I could eat or even freeze. It was a good pomegranate year. - Millet (792-)

This was really interesting, thanks very much for posting this. I really like pomegranates. I'm trying to grow some from seed but they always die after trying to make their second pair of leaves, I don't lmow what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks for posting Joe. It seems like I just got done reading the rankings in the CRFG from last year. I have an Eversweet Pomegranite growing in my yard. Any idea where one could acquire some of the ones mentioned in your review?

Thanks,
Phillip

Philip

Last Jan I went to a scion exchange at the Sacramento CRFG and they had some pomegranate cuttings. I got a parfinka That is 3 feet tall now and doing very well.

Helix

Thanks for your write up. I was there too with my wife. We didn't actually get to the tables until a good 30 minutes after the tasting started because of the crowding around the tables. As a result we missed out on some of the persimmon cultivars.
We noted that the taste spectrum for pomegranates there was relatively flat. Flavor seemed to only vary the amount of sweetness and tartness. Oddly the one exception we had was 'Wonderful' which had significantly more bitter tannins than any other variety.
Of course, we thought they all tasted good fresh, except for the very tart ones which we would eat with a little sugar.
Unfortunately, I don't have my tasting notes in front of me or I would be able to better comment on which ones we liked most.

Sorry for being away from the forum for so long; I've been up to so many other things that I sort of have neglected my citrus interests.

Millet, I officially have 32 or 33 cultivars in the ground and about another 20 in pots. I will probably eliminate a couple of varieties such as Elf (marketed by Dave Wilson as Garnet Sash), Sweet, and Crab (DWN = Silk). My official test plot consists of 11 cultivars with 8 replications. I harvested some fruit last year, quite a bit more this year, and should have a lot more next year. I sold some fruit locally, some online (much more difficult to pack and ship than chestnuts!), and small, split, or extra fruits to Joe for wine (about 600 pounds).

Phillip, I will be offering plants for sale of many of the varieties, though I've gotten off to a slower start than I had hoped. I was working with someone else who was helping me get started in this and things just didn't work out that well and I'll know where we stand later this month, hopefully. I'll be starting new cuttings soon. One thing I might eventually offer is multi-grafted trees as this will allow folks to try more varieties in areas in situations where they've got limited space. I have a nursery license and stock certificate and can ship anywhere in the USA once I've got plants ready. I will also be selling chestnut trees.

Now, just by coincidence, I've had some interesting discussions with a guy in Portugal that is related to both pomegranates and citrus. He is very convinced that when he was young that a neighbor grafted together an orange and a pomegranate (an approach graft, it sounds like, retaining both rootstocks, removing the pomegranate top after a union formed) and his neighbor created a pigmented orange. I'm highly skeptical, but his says he is sure of it. I've done some searching and found discussions of it at http://tinyurl.com/pomorange (Google book link to 18th century article) and http://www.gardenbanter.co.uk/united-kingdom/156784-blood-orange-sanguinello.html
(read last post and tell me if you understand the point the author is trying to make to support that he thinks it's plausible). What do you think? I've already discussed it with Joe and he's skeptical as well, but I'll probably give it a try!

Harvey, it is GREAT to see you on the forum again. We missed you. Tell me, what is your favorite pomegranate cultivar - taste wise? Further, is there enough difference in taste between cultivars to make that much of a difference? Your idea of a multiple variety pomegranate tree should be a real winner for you. Put me down as your first customer. Thanks - Millet (767-)

Which of your children are your favorite???

I have more favorites than ones I don't care for. Yes, the taste can vary quite a bit. Phillip, Eversweet is one that is sweet with soft seeds but it does lack much intensity of flavor so it's probably something I'd rank in the middle. Then there are some which have some great flavor but hard seeds (Ink, Cranberry, Palermo, Al-Sirin-Nar, etc.). Parfianka is a very good one with a nice balanace of flavor and fairly soft seeds and I've found it to be productive, producing fairly large fruits. Desertnyi is one of my favorites for a sweet type. It has a little tartness but still has a nice flavor with very soft seeds, nice as a "dessert" for which it is named. Gissarskii Rosovyi is nice but I wish it had a darker rind as it's yellow rind gets banged up easy and then they look unattractive. Sirinevyi is a very nice sweet one producing very large fruits with excellent flavor, though it's later ripening and they didn't ripen up very well for me this year since our summer was cool. One of my customers last year went wild for them and said he could see folks paying $10 each for them. Purple Heart (DWN = Sharp Velvet) is a variety developed by the late John Chater (like Eversweet) of Camarillo and mine tasted great last year but only "good" this year. Azadi is very productive producing sweet fruits with yellow rinds that hold up fairly well, though many of mine split for some reason (Jeff Moersfelder who manages the poms at Wolfskill told me that wasn't a problem there). They are sweet and have very soft seeds but just a mild flavor, but still something I can enjoy. Medovyi Vasha is one of my soft-seeded ones that I was a bit indifferent over and I thought I might want to get rid of it but Ed Valdivia told me yesterday that he thought it was one of my best fruits! Wonderful is also pretty good if you can get it to ripen fully, but it's seeds are a bit harder than some of my other choices. I only have one tree of Vina and it is a very nice sweet type with soft seeds. Sin Pepe is similar and nice, but the tree is a slow grower and not very producitve. I have Austin which was developed by Richard Ashton of Texas and he reportedly quit growing it because it wasn't hardy enough for his winters but it has grown well here. Since the trees started out smaller they set fruit late and didn't ripen up well, though I still picked one last week and thought it was very nice. It looks to be a very productive tree.

One of my quests is to try to grow a good-tasting pomegranate of decent size with a black rind. The ones from Iran I've seen are typically smaller than their red counterparts but I recently heard of black fruits in the two pound range and I'm hoping to get seeds of these to try.

A few years ago I knew very little about pomegranates but guess I've been obsessed with them and enjoy the great diversity. When I read the book Pomegranate Roads I found it to be fascinating and kept thinking of Dr. Levin as the "Indiana Jones of pomegranates". Before the research station was somewhat abandoned (I've got conflicting stories on how bad conditions are), he had 1,017 accessions there! He now lives near Tel Aviv and I have a friend who has visited him. A hobbyist was asking me questions earlier this year and I gave her Dr. Levin's phone number in Israel and she called him up and obtained answers for both of us! Nice to be able to speak Russian!

I started a pomegranate discussion group a few years ago and it's at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/PomWorldwide/?yguid=169722715. Not to detract from discussions here, but there are many other folks with opinions on particular fruits.

Thanks for the hearty welcome back!

One more quick note: I've got a partially-developed web site for poms at www.purelypoms.com

Harvey, my original question has not been answered. I thought last year's Wolfskill pomegranate tasting was the last one, and future tastings were going to be no more. What happened that there was one this year? Also, I had not trouble getting my Wonderful pomegranate to ripen - in a greenhouse. - Millet (767-)

Oh, sorry about that. In 2008 the curator said it would probably be the last tasting. Fortunately, he transferred to Florida and it's gotten better each year since. This year's tasting was attended by a record crowd (about 120) with several folks from other states (as far as Florida) and some from Greece and another country or two. The prior curator thought they had reached out to everybody already that could be reached in such a manner but that is clearly not the case. This year's event was even attended by the west coast supervisor of USDA ARS. This helps them help justify their budget to congress, for one thing.