Australia is the last bastion of some rare apple varieties

As the burgeoning cider industry looks to new apple varieties for cider-making, David Pickering, in retirement, is finding he's a man in demand.

The former NSW Department of Primary Industries officer is now the person who chases down rare varieties of apple and can identify them with confidence, given his many years of expertise in the field.

From his Orange farm he provides budwood to orchards and cider-makers wanting to hitch a ride on the new phenomena of cider drinking.

Recently a NSW orchard, Glenbernie Orchards, at Darkes Forest on the NSW South Coast won the world's best sparkling perry cider award and also many medals for their apple varieties. Owner Jo-anne Fahey gave some of the kudos for their success to David Pickering for helping track down heritage apple varieties including a Kingston Black apple.

It's an amazing situation that Australia is now the repository of many rare apple varieties that have either died out or have been lost in traditional cider-making countries such as the United Kingdom and France.

These acidic heritage varieties are excellent for cider-making, As Jo Fahey says of them "you wouldn't want to bite one as it's so tart it'd suck your whole face in". But they make excellent cider.

There are over 10 lost English cider apple varieties that can be found in Australia.

For what was once a hobby, apples are now David's life as he sells budwood to people who want to grow certain varieties. He was with the DPI for many years "working with weeds and weather stations" and cider apples were just a hobby. He had a travel grant and learnt about the vast repository of over 600 apple varieties at Grove Research Station in the Huon Valley in Tasmania, then run by the Tasmanian DPI. Interestingly, these Grove apple trees had actually been transplanted and grafted from an ex-Orange collection, way back in the 1970s when the NSW DPI closed an apple nursery.

David went to a permanent role in the NSW DPI working with cider apples from 2007. His research led him around the world and especially to England where he tracked down a popular cider variety Kingston Black that is now used widely in Australia for cider-making. "It's a fantastic producer of cider," he says.

He helped identify some of the varieties at Grove that were wrongly identified on relocation, and was able to detect one variety, Yarlington Mill, that most believed had become extinct where it was grown in England. There's now a couple of Australian cider makers making cider from Yarlington Mill apples that he helped source budwood for - Three Sons near Canberra and Willie Smith's near Cygnet in Tasmania. One of Willie Smith's sparkling ciders is based entirely on heritage apples and with the growing taste for cider, the search for perfect cider apples is ever growing.

David publishes material on these rare varieties on the website CiderOz, with a visual guide on what to look for in the seeds of the apple when it's ripe for harvest. All apples in Australia are harvested by hand, but David believes at some stage mechanical harvesting will come in because cider apples are quickly pulped after harvest for cider so there is no threat to quality. Most cider apples are extremely acidic and it's this characteristic that eventually helps the cider taste.

The NSW DPI produced a poster in 2008 of the 30 varieties of cider apple in Australia that appeared to be true-to-type, he says. Since that time the number of varieties has grown to 34 and two posters have been developed which illustrates and places them in their respective classes eg sweet, bittersweet, bittersharp, sharp and sweet and includes varieties such as the Bulmers Norman, de Boutteville, Foxwhelp, Stoke Red, Clozette, and Rousse Latour.

You don't always have to go acidic or rare to get a good cider apple. Some good cider is made from the popular eating apple, Red Lady, in Western Australia.

The valuable apple collection at Grove is under threat. Mike Oakford, who runs Woodstock Orchards nearby in the Huon Valley, was the manager for the Tasmanian DPI at the station for decades and actually helped graft many of the apple varieties when they came down from NSW. It grew to a big 600-tree collection, with trees tightly planted together. Grove has been leased out and there is talk the Tasmanian government may sell it - putting the future of the vast repository of apples - the biggest and rarest in Australia - under a cloud. "This would be a terrible loss." Mr Oakford says. "It has some rare stuff. It's all been let go and not looked after."

Luckily the Magnus family, also in the Huon, have taken many cuttings from Grove over time and propogated some of the heritage apples. Recently the Magnus's released their own sourced variety of rare apple - Magnus Summer Surprise, grown from a cross of crab and normal apples with a beautiful red flesh. The Magnus's have patented the variety, as many orchards now do.

For David Pickering, variety has truly proved the spice of life ... and for Australian cider-makers.