Our Own Sweet Rollercoaster

The best cherries are irresistible: dramatically dark, bite-sized, crunchy but still melting in texture, with an intense tangy-sweet flavor that begs you to eat another.

Too often, however, cherries are small, underripe and disappointing. The saga of the California cherry industry is full of ups and downs: bumper crops and weather-induced disasters; giant, matchless cherries and mediocre, pinkish fruits; the decline of traditional growing areas and the emergence of new markets.

But for those who are careful, the state offers transcendent cherry experiences, from mouth-watering Bings to a fruit paradise in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, where you can sample exquisite Coe’s Transparents and legendary, outrageously flavorful Dukes.

California’s cherry season, which will reach its peak in the next couple of weeks, begins in April with a gold rush near Arvin, in the southeastern corner of the Central Valley. Few Americans ever taste this crop; it’s virtually all air-freighted to Japan, where brokers vie to procure the first cherries. They’ll pay up to $135 for an 18-pound carton, five to 10 times what Americans will pay. The Japanese so prize cherries that they’ll spend a shogun’s ransom at department stores for two or three fruits in a paper cup.

Until recently, cherries were rarely grown in the southern half of the Central Valley because the hot summers caused trees to bear “spurs” and “doubles,” malformed fruits. In the last decade, after breeders developed two early-bearing varieties, Brooks and Tulare, that proved resistant to this problem, growers planted several thousand acres.

On a sweltering morning at Steven Murray’s ranch near Arvin, in the shadow of the Tehachapi Range, bright red fruit gleams like Christmas lights on the branches as Murray ties yellow ribbons to the trees ready for picking. While workers with metal buckets strapped to their waists maneuver tall ladders into the canopies, Murray exhorts them to pick only the darkest cherries and to be gentle when they pour the fruits into giant bins.

Last year, for once, the Arvin growers struck gold with a huge harvest. This year, more typically, a lack of the winter cold necessary for cherries to set fruit resulted in a light crop in the area. Even experimental low-chill varieties, which might potentially allow cherries to be grown as far south as Los Angeles, had few fruits.

The problem is that cherries have exacting climatic requirements. If the winter is too warm, or if it freezes or rains during bloom, fruit set suffers; if rain falls around harvest time, the cherries swell and crack open, leaving them unsalable.

Vanishing ‘Tarts’

Early on a harvest morning in Linden, in the heart of California’s main cherry district, dew still moistens the leaves as J.P. Barbagelata roars on a three-wheeled cart around his 40-acre orchard of cherries and walnuts. Pulling up to a gnarled old tree with a 3-foot-thick trunk, he reaches out to a branch heavily laden with small, purplish-black cherries with finger-staining black juice and a remarkably nuanced blackberry-like flavor.

“When my dad arrived from Italy in 1919, the Black Tartarian was the fresh cherry grown around here,” he says, popping a fruit in his mouth. “It’s still my favorite for eating, but it’s small and soft, so there’s no demand for them, except at farmers markets. The Tarts are here strictly as a pollinator for the other trees.”

He rides over to a tree of Bings, large, plump, crisp and aromatic fruits that account for more than 80% of California’s crop. Fortunately for cherry lovers, the Bing tastes as good as it ships, a combination rare in the world of fruit.

In the days when growers shipped mostly to local markets, soft varieties like the Black Tartarian, known as “hearts” for their signature shape, were much appreciated for their fine flavor and tender texture. According to Edward Bunyard, the great early 20th century English philosopher of fruit, some connoisseurs considered firm-fleshed varieties “a blot on the cherry escutcheon.”

But in the last 50 years, the increased importance of long-distance shipments led to the dominance of roundish, crunchy types, called bigarreaux (the name originally meant bicolored, like the yellow and red Royal Ann, but it came to refer to all firm cherries).

Although other varieties are nipping at its heels, the Bing continues to be king. Its longtime consort, the Royal Ann, has fallen from its throne. At one time the most illustrious of bigarreaux, this light-fleshed cherry with yellow skin mottled by a red blush was once California’s most important variety, used for canning and brining (to make maraschinos), and beloved as a fresh fruit for its size, beauty and rich flavor.

For its time it was a giant, but the Rainier, a similar-looking but bigger, sweeter Washington-bred variety introduced in 1960, has taken its place.

The Rainier may lack the complexity of a dead-ripe Royal Ann, but it’s extraordinarily sweet, registering up to 24 degrees Brix (a scale measuring sweetness), compared to an average of 18 for Bings.

Growing it to perfection takes some coddling. In cherry country, it’s not uncommon to see a stand of Rainier trees, like bathing beauties out for a tan, soaking up the rays from Mylar reflectors spread on the ground to intensify the blush on the fruits.

An Early Start

Fittingly, the California cherry industry got its start with the Gold Rush. Spanish missionaries and Russian traders kept a few cherry trees, but it was only after 1850, with the arrival of American settlers, that substantial orchards were planted.

Through the early 20th century, Santa Clara, Alameda and other counties adjoining San Francisco Bay, blessed with an ideal climate for cherries, were the main growing areas. Plantings peaked at 18,000 acres in 1927, just as Washington overtook California as the leading sweet cherry producer.

Over the next two decades, the cherry industry moved east to San Joaquin County, around Stockton, where land and water were relatively cheap. Although Santa Clara still grew the finest cherries, economics favored San Joaquin, which emerged after World War II as the California industry’s center.

After a decline in the 1970s caused by disease and urbanization, the cherry industry has expanded steadily since the opening of the export market to Japan in 1987; it’s an estimated 21,000 acres today.

That’s an all-time high, and many farmers fear that if the trend continues, oversupply may lead to bust. According to some counts, California’s record crop last year, 106.7 million pounds, actually surpassed Washington’s. Usually Washington and Oregon rank first and second in sweet cherry production. This year’s California harvest initially appeared to be average, about 67 million pounds, though a rainstorm in the Central Valley Monday night could have reduced that by as much as 10%.

Today, two-thirds of California’s crop grows in the triangle formed by Stockton, Linden and Lodi, where mild delta breezes moderate the heat of the San Joaquin Valley, allowing cherries to mature slowly enough to build size, firmness and flavor.

Despite the commercial predominance of the San Joaquin Valley, it’s the Santa Clara Valley, where the sea breezes bring moderate temperatures, warm days and cool nights, that produces the state’s largest, finest cherries.

Valley of Heart’s Delight

In Morgan Hill, south of San Jose, Andy Mariani sometimes picks cherries as large as small plums, though such behemoths are rare. With most fruits, bigger does not mean better, but for cherries, size is important for commercial and taste reasons: Larger ones generally have more sugar and flavor.

Humans like the same climate as cherries, though, and that is proving to be the undoing of Santa Clara’s farmers. In California’s golden age of stone fruit between the wars, it was known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight, but in the 1950s and ‘60s, factories and subdivisions pushed out the orchards, leaving only a vestige of commercial production in the renamed Silicon Valley.

Santa Clara’s cherry season starts a few weeks later than Stockton’s, typically the end of May. About the third week of June, Mariani holds a cherry tasting of 40 to 50 of his hundred-odd cherry varieties.

The lucky visitors gobble rare cherries (many available nowhere else) set out in wicker baskets on long tables as they trade rare-fruit stories and listen to Mariani.

“Depth of flavor is what you look for,” he says as he bites into a Black Republican, the dark, sweet father of the Bing. Abandoning his usual understatement, he rhapsodizes about the Black Eagle’s intense, complex taste. On this day he calls it his favorite, but his eyes gleam as he holds a Coe’s Transparent up to the sun, revealing the stone. The dainty little fruits, pale salmon with a pink blush, have tender, almost liquid flesh and sugary sweet juice.

Most intriguing is a dead-ripe San Martin Duke with a penetrating citrusy flavor. Dukes, crosses of sweet and sour cherries that share the characteristics of both types, have an ideally refreshing balance of sweetness and acidity.

Regarded as the aristocrats of cherries a century ago, they’re ill-suited to modern commerce and are grown only by fruit collectors today.

‘The Santa Clara Valley Is Done For’

Mariani’s tastings may not continue much longer, as development marches south and swallows prime agricultural land. He claims that since Morgan Hill has become a bedroom community--traffic heading north on U.S. Highway 101 often jams by 5:30 a.m.--warmer winters caused by asphalt, autos and heated homes mean he rarely sees a full crop anymore.

“We used to get over 1,000 hours of chilling in a winter; now it’s more like 700 to 800,” he says wistfully. “The Santa Clara Valley is done for.”

This has already happened in Sunnyvale, just west of San Jose. Once, this district grew the state’s very finest cherries, with a climate even more ideal than what’s farther south.

Now, Charlie Olsen, tall and tanned with a farmer’s giant hands, rescues one last miraculously bountiful crop just ahead of the bulldozers tearing up his family’s 12-acre farm.

“We’ve been here 100 years, but we’re broke, and the land is worth upwards of $1 million an acre,” Olsen says. “It turns my stomach, but what can I do?” From his favorite tree, he picks a lusciously huge, crisp Bing, bursting with layer upon layer of flavor.

A bit later, his daughter Debbie strolls across the road to a 3-acre plot of cherry trees owned by the city of Sunnyvale, which the family will continue to farm, almost as a living historical museum.

Her fruit stand will continue to sell Santa Clara cherries until only the ghosts of vanished orchards remain to sing of sun and sea breezes, of what was once California’s best cherry land, now covered with houses.

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U PICK ‘EM

Picking cherries at Leona Valley’s small orchards has become a rite of spring for many Southern California families.

But the opening of the season this year is uncertain because of the weather. To find out when, call the Leona Valley Cherry Assn. hotline: (661) 266-7116.