South Tyrol

How apples came

Fruit trees are old here. Seeds of wild fruit have been found at Neolithic sites in and around South Tyrol, the Romans brought grafting to its valleys, and in the Middle Ages Bavarian monasteries took over its orchards and vineyards¹. Around 1500 Hans Haring of Latsch, in the Vinschgau, wrote a 156-page manuscript on grafting, frost protection and the picking and storing of fruit, which two of the region’s fruit researchers call its first “textbook” (translated). Grafting, named varieties such as the Bozner Apfel and the markets of Bozen (Bolzano) and Meran (Merano) made fruit a settled trade in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries¹.

Exports began by the end of the 1700s, mainly to Germany and Russia³, and from the mid-nineteenth century buyers came from Innsbruck, Munich, Vienna, Warsaw and Saint Petersburg². A Bozen nursery list offered 193 apple varieties in 1856^2,3, and in 1873 Bozen sent 191 named apples to the World Exhibition in Vienna¹. A schoolmaster, Johann Jakob Pöll, published the first local manual of fruit growing in 1831²; the agricultural institute at San Michele all’Adige opened in 1874, and there in 1887 Karl Mader sprayed a copper and lime mixture against apple scab with success¹.

Railways made fruit an industry. In 1894–1903 South Tyrol produced about 12,000 tonnes of fruit a year and exported 9,000, and the embanking of the Adige in 1880–1891, as the railway was built, turned the marshes of the valley floor into meadows and orchards. Trees still stood scattered across hay meadows and grain fields, usually 10 m or more apart, and fodder for the cattle came first; orchards of 100 to 350 trees a hectare appeared only in the late 1940s. After the First World War South Tyrol passed to Italy. Cut off from its Central European markets and from the wine trade to the Habsburg lands, it turned its valley floor increasingly to fruit, and by 1934 orchards covered 8,390 ha¹.

In 1955–60 the Kalterer Böhmer (27–33%) and the Champagner Renette (about 18%) led a crop of 203,000 to 262,000 tonnes a year, with Golden Delicious and Red Delicious under 2% each. Controlled-atmosphere stores, first built in the early 1960s, favoured the varieties that kept in them, Jonathan, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious and Morgenduft, and the old sorts faded from the statistics¹.

How they’re grown

The orchards lie in valleys south of the main Alpine chain, where the mountains to the north keep the rain off³. The specification of the protected geographical indication (PGI), Mela Alto Adige or Südtiroler Apfel, counts more than 300 days of sunshine a year and late-summer days of up to 30 °C with nights of 8–10 °C, and sets the orchards between 200 and 1,100 m². Rainfall runs from about 500 mm a year at Schlanders in the Vinschgau to 800–900 mm between Meran and Salurn¹; the Vinschgau’s orchards lie at 500 to 1,000 m, dried by a wind off the Reschen pass⁷.

Some 6,200 deep wells, mostly in the valley floor from Meran to Salurn, feed sprinklers set above the crowns since the 1950s, which also guard the blossom against late frost¹. On a freezing night they seal the flowers in ice⁷, and one such night can use 5 million m³ of water, against the 12 million m³ that Bozen drinks in a year¹.

Farms are small: at the 2020 census 6,057 farms grew apples on 18,216 ha, down from 7,278 on 18,541 ha in 2010⁴. Trees have crowded closer, from about 300 a hectare on seedling rootstocks before the 1960s to an average of 3,500–4,000 since 1995; the first close plantings on M9 went in at Laimburg in 1969¹. The Laimburg research centre at Pfatten, founded by a provincial law of 3 November 1975, began work on 1 January 1976^1,5. It began breeding apples in 1997, and its dynamic controlled-atmosphere storage, which reads the fruit’s fluorescence to keep the oxygen just above the point of stress¹, went into commercial use in 2005⁵. Four scab-resistant varieties selected there joined the PGI in an amendment published in January 2025².

Orchards are losing ground to vineyards, and more are farmed organically, at lower yields; the province expects million-tonne harvests to grow harder to reach as high-yielding old varieties are replaced and the weather becomes more erratic⁵. In August 2026 warm nights were holding back Gala’s colour, and its picking window around Bozen and in the Unterland had shrunk to about 20 days⁹.

What’s picked

South Tyrol harvested 1,056,980 tonnes of apples in 2025, its third year running above a million; about 9.6% went for processing. Golden Delicious led the table fruit with 245,333 tonnes, followed by Gala, Cripps Pink and Granny Smith, and organic growers picked 100,101 tonnes. Of 17,491 ha of apple and pear orchards, all but 43 ha were apples, with 3,898 ha of Golden Delicious and 3,373 ha of Gala⁵. In 2011 the province grew more than half of Italy’s apples and one in nine of the EU’s¹; Italy held 13% of the EU’s apple orchard area in 2023⁶.

Gala opens the season in August and Cripps Pink closes it in November⁹. In the Vinschgau picking runs from the end of August to early November, by hand, in up to five passes depending on the variety, into bins of about 300 kg⁸; the valley alone averages about 320,000 tonnes a year⁷. Long storage is in cold stores, in normal air or at low or ultra-low oxygen³, and by 2009/10 the co-operatives ran 213 large rooms under dynamic controlled atmosphere¹. In 2025 the province certified 147,182 tonnes of apples for export outside the EU, 65% of them to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Norway, Brazil and Israel⁵.

On the table

The South Tyrol tourism portal calls apple strudel in shortcrust pastry a South Tyrolean speciality, its apples mixed with sultanas, pine nuts, rum and crumbs toasted in butter¹⁰. Farm kitchens dip slices of apple in batter and fry them as Apfelkiachl; in the old days, the Roter Hahn farm portal notes beside a Naturns farmer’s recipe, they “even stood in for the wedding cake” (translated)¹¹.

The German word is Apfel, from Old High German apful¹²; the Italian mela comes from a popular Latin mēlum¹³. Picking is klauben, a southern German and Austrian word for taking things up one by one¹⁴, and Vinschgau growers call the harvest das Klauben⁸.

Notes

• In 1873 Bozen sent 191 named apple varieties to the World Exhibition in Vienna¹.
• The PGI caps fresh-market yields at an average of 68 t/ha over the whole area³.
• Golden Delicious still filled 22% of the province’s orchards in 2025⁵.

Where the sources disagree

• Growers. The single document counts 8,000 growers, 2,500 packing-house workers and 12,000 pickers², and the 2021 specification also has about 8,000 growers³; the 2024 amendment’s explanation says about 6,000², and the 2020 census found 6,057 farms with apples⁴.
• Exports. The specification dates the first exports to the end of the 1700s³; the single document speaks of foreign buyers from the mid-nineteenth century².
• San Michele. The single document has fruit growing taught there “in 1872, at the newly established” institute²; Dalla Via and Mantinger date its opening to 10 November 1874¹.
• Breeding. The province dates Laimburg’s apple breeding to 1997⁵; Dalla Via and Mantinger say it was decided in 1995 and the first crosses made in 1996¹.
• Altitude. The single document says most of the crop comes from holdings above 500 m²; no statistic of orchard area by altitude was found to check it. VIP’s page gives the Vinschgau as 500 to 1,000 m and, further down, 500 to 1,100 m⁷.
• Italy’s share. South Tyrol’s 2025 crop would be about 47% of Italy’s estimated 2,248,000 tonnes⁵, an inference no source states; the last stated share found is “more than half”, in 2011¹.
• The last variety. ORF names it by its trade mark⁹; it is written here as the cultivar, Cripps Pink.