Val di Non Apple

Mela Val di Non has been a protected DOP since 1996, the first Italian apple to get one. Three varieties qualify, and they behave very differently.

Golden Delicious accounts for most of the crop. Golden-yellow skin, usually with pronounced russeting around the stem, crisp flesh, sweet and aromatic with a tart edge that the same variety loses when grown on flat land. That russeting is not a flaw: it is how the skin reacts to sharp day-night temperature swings, and growers read it as a marker of altitude.

Renetta Canada is the opposite in every way: flattened, irregular, rough bronze-green skin russeted across the whole surface. It is tart, aromatic and slightly floury. This is the cooking apple, the one that goes into strudel and fritters, and it has been grown in the valley for over a century.

Red Delicious is the red one: conical, with five pronounced lobes at the base, crisp and sweet with low acidity and thick skin. Children like it, and it collapses when cooked.

Most of the crop is handled by Consorzio Melinda, formed in 1989 out of the valley's cooperatives, which is why in Italy the brand is better known than the designation. The two are not the same: Melinda also sells varieties outside the DOP rules, from Fuji to Pink Lady. The words to look for are Mela Val di Non DOP.

The common thread is snap. A mountain-grown apple is dense and hard, and it breaks under the tooth rather than compressing, a direct consequence of cool nights slowing sugar accumulation and keeping cell walls firm.

Golden Delicious from here tastes considerably better than the reputation of the variety elsewhere: honeyed and floral, with real acidity behind the sweetness instead of the flat sugariness of a lowland Golden.

Renetta is sharply tart, almost lemony, with a dry, faintly grainy flesh and a strong aroma that survives baking. Eaten raw it divides people; cooked, it is the reason the variety still exists.

Red Delicious is sweet, mild and low in acid: a crunchy eating apple with little complexity.

Match the variety to the job: using the wrong one is the single most common mistake.

Renetta Canada is the baking apple. It holds its shape without collapsing entirely, releases acidity and aroma, and browns more slowly than the others. It is the apple for Trentino strudel, for apple fritters, for baked apples with butter and sugar, and for any tart where you want the slices to stay visible.

Golden Delicious is the everyday one: raw, in salads, in soft cakes, in compotes and juice. Its sweetness lets you cut the sugar in a recipe. Cooked long, it breaks down, which makes it ideal for purée and for the mustard-fruit preserves of northern Italy.

Red Delicious is for eating raw. Cooked it turns mealy and bland.

On the savoury side, these apples belong to alpine cooking: with game and roast pork, in horseradish and apple sauce, grated into sweet dumplings, and above all beside mountain cheese. A slice of raw apple with a piece of Puzzone di Moena and rye bread is standard mountain-hut fare.

One practical point: Renetta skin is thick and should come off for delicate dishes, while Golden skin can stay on in rustic tarts and baked halves, where it holds the slice together.

An apple keeps breathing after picking, and everything about keeping it comes down to slowing that down. The consortium does it with controlled atmosphere stores at 1 to 2°C and very low oxygen, which is why Val di Non fruit is on shelves nearly all year. At home the crisper drawer at 0 to 4°C in a perforated bag is the closest equivalent, and Golden Delicious will hold four to eight weeks there. In a fruit bowl at room temperature the same apple runs through those changes several times faster, in one or two weeks.

What you see over that time: water escapes through the skin so the fruit loses weight and the surface wrinkles, most visibly on the russeted Renetta; the flesh moves from crisp to mealy as the cell walls soften; and the skin can turn faintly greasy as natural waxes come to the surface. Apples give off a lot of ethylene, so they hasten everything stored beside them and are best kept apart from leaf vegetables. Cut faces brown within minutes, and slices freeze for months only for cooking, since whole apples collapse.

Start with the sticker, because without it a Golden Delicious from the Val di Non and one from anywhere else look much the same in a crate. The fruit carries the DOP mark with the wording Mela Val di Non, usually alongside the Melinda consortium branding, and boxes state the growers association. Then look at the fruit itself: the mountain Golden carries a pink blush on the sun side that lowland ones do not, fine russeting round the stem and a dense skin flecked with lenticels. Pressed with a thumb it should not dent.

The DOP also covers Renetta Canada, which looks nothing like it: squat, irregular, with a rough matte green-brown russeted skin and a sharply acidic flesh meant for the oven. Red Delicious is the tall five pointed one. Abroad the confusion is almost entirely with generic Golden Delicious grown in France, Poland or South Tyrol, which sit in the same bins at a lower price. In Italy DOP apples run 1.80 to 2.80 euro a kilo; loose commodity Goldens cost noticeably less and carry no consortium sticker.

Outside Italy the DOP is hard to find as such. Trentino apples that are exported usually travel under the commercial brand or simply as Italian apples, and Italy is not a major apple exporter to the US, where domestic varieties dominate. In practice, the realistic route is Italian delicatessens and online Italian grocers in Europe, at roughly 3 to 5 euros a kilo, or 3 to 5 pounds a kilo in the UK. In Italy the same fruit is 1.80 to 3 euros a kilo.

If you want the variety rather than the origin, Renetta Canada is the one worth hunting: France and Belgium sell it as Reinette grise du Canada, and it is the apple that changes a strudel.

What to look for on the label: the EU DOP mark and the words Mela Val di Non DOP. The Melinda brand alone is not the designation: the consortium also markets varieties outside the rules.

And on the fruit itself: weight relative to size, no give under thumb pressure, and, in the case of Golden, russeting around the stem. A perfectly smooth, glossy, uniform Golden almost certainly came from flat land.

Cles is the main town, and the valley's cooperative shops there and in Taio, Tuenno, Sanzeno, Coredo and Romeno sell direct, and in autumn they carry varieties that never reach supermarkets.

Segno, a hamlet of Predaia, has the consortium's visitor centre, where the industrial scale of the operation becomes clear and where you can see the system of cold stores dug into a disused dolomite mine inside the mountain.

The sanctuary of San Romedio, perched on a rock spur above the valley, and the lake of Tovel are the two classic outings, both surrounded by orchards.

Two windows are worth planning around. The last week of April and the first of May, when blossom turns the entire valley white, one of the more startling agricultural sights in Italy. Or late September and October, during harvest, when all three varieties are freshly picked and the Renettas are at their best.