Growing up with your own orchard, as Frank McNallydid, you tend to take apples for granted.
Ours was an old orchard and the varieties in it must have been even older. But I barely recall what any of them were now, and the trees are no longer around to jog my memory.
The name Beauty of Bath still lingers, probably because it was the earliest of the early-season varieties. Impatient for autumn, the children of the house would have resorted to eating poisonously bitter crab apples before the Beauty of Bath took us out of our suffering in early August. Even then, it still being the height of summer, you always had to fight off wasps for every bite.
It's a glorious thing to have an orchard. Long before environmentalists preached that food should be eaten as close to its source as possible, I was adopting this approach with apples. Many's the happy time I spent reclining among the upper branches, simultaneously enjoying the fruit and the view.
It was a great place to skip farm-work, although there was always the cover story that you were in fact performing look-out duty, watching for town boys bent on thievery. That was the one drawback of having your own orchard, in fact. You never experienced the thrill of robbing one.
Whatever about Beauties of Bath, I'm fairly sure I never saw or met any Pink Ladies in our orchard, though you meet them everywhere else these days. Well, not quite everywhere, as I have recently discovered.
I first met the Pink Lady in a Marks and Spencers store a couple of years back. It was infatuation at first sight. Her voluptuous shape, her blushing complexion, that impossibly perfect skin. You wanted to bite her right there and then (although you couldn't because, as usual in M&S, she was covered in unnecessary packaging).
The taste lived up to the appearance, however. After years of eating bland apples that were certified free of flavour, this was a revelation. It even lived up to the price, which was in the neighbourhood of €1 per apple. The texture was strikingly firm. And it was so sweet, you had to remind yourself that it was also wholesome.
In short, the PL was an exciting discovery - and a chance one, or so I flattered myself for a while. Then I realised the whole thing was a honey trap. In reality, I had been targeted by a carefully planned marketing operation.
Bred in Australia, a cross between Golden Delicious and Lady Williams, the Pink Lady has been created and aggressively promoted as a premium apple. Everything about it is controlled. It is grown under licence, and only its perfect specimens are sold as PLs. Most of the crop goes to market as the non-premium "Cripps Pink".
Worryingly - from my point of view - the particular targets of the marketing campaign are women. Young women, especially. The PL is more than just an apple. It is that dreaded thing: a lifestyle choice. They promote it in the glossy magazines, apparently. And the calculated approach is paying off, with rapid penetration of European markets.
I still like the PL, although knowing what I now know, I feel a bit used. So more recently, I've been buying another kind of apple - this time Irish. It's a group of apples, really - all red, and all marketed under the name Celtic Orchards. This too is a branding exercise, of course, complete with the packaging. But in some respects, Celtic Orchard apples are the opposite of Pink Ladies. They tend to be bumpier in shape. They come with the odd skin blemish. And the texture is very noticeably softer. But the main thing is they taste like apples ought to, and once did. I was sufficiently impressed to track down Cornelius Traas, a spokesman for CO, to find out more.
A Tipperary-born son of Dutch parents, Traas explained that the Celtic Orchards label was devised two years ago because some imported apples were being passed off as Irish in shops. There are only about 40 commercial growers left here, he said, many supplying only local markets. CO is an umbrella group for a handful of producers in the southern counties who supply the Supervalu and Superquinn chains.
There's nothing particularly Irish about the varieties, he admits. They range from the early-season Red Windsor (actually German) to the late Jonagored. But Irish-grown apples contain only about half the cells of those grown in hotter countries, so for good or bad, their texture will always be much less dense.
It is a world away from Pink Ladies to the situation that once existed in Ireland, when small orchards proliferated and people grew whatever varieties they could get their hands on. Wasps were the main competition in the apple sector then. But that Garden of Eden ended with EEC accession. The mighty French apple industry soon swept all before it, while the southern hemisphere filled any gaps in the year-round supply.
Now, thanks to climate change, the wheel is turning again. Not only are the days of flying horticultural produce half-way around the planet numbered. Ironically, global warming also means it is getting easier to grow apples in Ireland.
This is a very mixed blessing, Traas knows. If he could, he would stop the temperatures where they are now. But he can't. And as long as climate change remains a reality, Irish apple-growing looks set for a return to something like what it was before the forces of globalisation robbed the orchard.