Best pear trees for wine

[Dirtydog420]

Just wondering if anyone makes pear wine regularly and which pears taste best?

Hopefully going buy a piece of land from my parents and one of the frst things im going to do is plant some pear trees..

 

[djrockinsteve]

I prefer the sweeter pears. Usually mix them with my apples. My neighbor up the street gave me pails of pears last year from their pear trees. They were huge. Don't know what kind they were.

Keep in mind most pear trees require two and some three pear trees for proper pollination.

 

[Dirtydog420]

I have heard that but there is a single pear tree on the property already with I harvested last year and I got 50 pounds from that tree.. However this year there was maybe 5 pears on it total.. I was planning on talking to someone who knows more than I anyway but just wanted some ideas for good pear trees..

 

[djrockinsteve]

Fruit trees need to be trimmed yearly. You usually need pollinaing trees within 100 feet for the bees to do their thing. A neighbor last year really trimmed their apple tree. It had few if any apples until the following year. It was loaded.

 

[Mud]

Seems like there was just a thread like this, but I don't see it. Maybe it was about cider apples. <scratches head>

Some trees are strongly biennial. They bare every second year with little or nothing in between. If it drops fruit early it might be a case of june drop. Plenty of info online about June drop. If the roots are oxygen starved the fruit will likely drop later than June but when still immature. That can happen from laying plastic or landscaping fabric around a tree for weed control. Remove the barrier and aerate with something like a Garden Weasel or sod aerator. Compost & use mulch for weed control and it should recover just fine.

50 lbs of pears is nothing compared to what a well maintained tree can produce. A couple years ago I got nearly 400 lbs from my mechanic's standard pear. It hadn't been topped in years, if ever, and most of the fruit was out of reach. I got all that 400 lbs. with a 12' picker. Considering the tree was over 30' tall you can imagine what was left on it.

By the way, all I can say about pears is don't bother planting standard trees. They are long lived and don't bear for a very long time. Semi-dwarfs have a shorter life span but will bear in 3-5 years. Semi-dwarfs will likely be on OHxF (OHF, Old Home x Farmingdale) root stocks. I'd look for OHxF 333 as it's very disease resistant and productive. A good nursery can recommend what you need.

Look for a nursery that is at your latitude or more northern if you're in an area subject to freezing. Even trees rated for your zone will be more likely to split of grown further south.

 

[Dirtydog420]

I found a nursery in Maine that has a bunch of different types of pear and apple trees.. They have really good prices too..

I do not think that any pears trees grown here in Maine will ever have 400 pounds of fruit on it.. Last year I thought the tree was pretty full of fruit but maybe I was wrong..

 

[Tom]

The best pears are the ones that are "overripe"! When I do pear I get whats available that are the over ripe