North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Rodney" <reveland@collinscom.net>]

I found this at the Dave Wilson website which was pointed out by Spidra
Webster in the "Four to a hole" thread.

http://davewilson.com/br40/taste_report_04.pdf

The Dave Wilson folks have been working on taste testing for quite some time
now. The only drawback I see is that they only test the varieties that are
available in their area so lots of other fine varieties are not compared.
The following excerpt is something I think most of us would agree
with..................

Samples of grocery store fruits have been included in several of the
tastings to test the assumption that fresh market fruit, necessarily picked
before peak ripeness for shipping and handling, is not as desirable as fully
ripe fruit. Nine of eleven samples of grocery store fruit were rated in the
top half of all samples in attractiveness (3.6 or higher), but none were
rated in the top half for overall eating quality (5.8 or higher). Since 1996
we have not subjected our tasters to grocery store
fruits............................

While I agree that  grocery store fruit doesn't have the flavor of fruit
picked at it's peak, I would prefer it still be tasted every year to
continually make "the point" rather than letting the data get stale.

Are there other fruit tasters out there make a serious attempt to rate
fruits by taste, appearance, etc.?

P.S.  I rarely buy store nectarines because most of the ones I come across
aren't as tasty to me as peaches. Is that common?