An Italian 'fruit detective' who investigates centuries-old paintings

It also turns out that there are hundreds of local / regional cultivars grown for a variety of specific purposes (way beyond today's mass-marketed four or five varieties). Many farms had an orchard, which consisted of a few to a few dozen trees, each with different cultivars cloned by grafting. Different varieties were good for different purposes, such as eating directly (dessert apples), baking, storing, cider, producing early or late, etc. These varieties really do make a difference. I spent one autumn picking apples and we could take home a bag every day, and it was really interesting as the season went through the varieties. One day, we had a few Wolf River trees to pick; they were huge like coconut-sized (no exaggeration), and bred for baking. Indeed they tasted not good, but I brought three home and my mom made two pies - everyone thought those were amazing.

There are a number of efforts in the US and England, both govt (e.g., USDA) and private, working to preserve these often rare cultivars. One is in Bolton Massachusetts, New England Botanic Garden’s Historic Apple Orchard [0]. They sometimes have to hunt in very obscure places to find just a twig of an old cultivar, bring it back and graft it to a rootstock. They are doing a lot of fascinating DNA analysis and cataloging, and it's a pretty big data management project too, to keep track of who has examples of what cultivars, in what condition, etc..

[0] https://nebg.org/orchard/

There was a robust social effort back then to select and grow the best cider apple trees, but those orchards were cut down during prohibition