Cornell has developed more than 250 varieties of apples, grapes, berries, and stone fruits. Pictured here is the Empire apple.

If the Cornell horticultural scientists who develop new fruit and vegetable varieties waited for the Nobel moment, they’d be long since retired. Sometimes years of field testing and gauging the marketplace come first, before a nameless numbered variety is deemed worthy of a name. The majority of new-variety trials don’t even make it that far. Those that do have earned the Cornell imprimatur—designating a new variety that shows great promise for being a cut above the rest and a grower’s best bet in an agricultural environment of emerging diseases, a changing climate, and evolving marketplace expectations.

One stand-out success—among the more than 250 varieties of apples, grapes, berries, and stone fruits developed at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva since 1880—is the ‘Heritage’ red raspberry. The first raspberry specifically bred to ripen in the fall—with the quality and firmness that shippers and wholesalers demand—‘Heritage’ was heralded by raspberry growers because the new variety paved the way for the year-round fresh market, according to Cornell’s Courtney Weber, associate professor of horticultural sciences. ‘Heritage’ became one of the most widely grown raspberry cultivars in the world and was finally recognized in 2004 as “outstanding” by the American Society for Horticultural Science. Experiment Station breeders had suspected as much, in the 35 years between the release of ‘Heritage’ and its recognition.

The same year the raspberry finally won its prize, Cornell Professor of Plant Breeding Martha Mutschler unveiled a milestone in an ongoing effort to develop an onion that is resistant to botrytis leaf blight. Using a host of techniques not available to Cornell breeders in the 19th or even 20th centuries, Mutschler’s multidisciplinary team had to overcome what she called the sexual barrier that limited seed production and had stymied previous attempts to cross different species.

The traits for disease resistance were found in a wild plant species sometimes used in rock gardens—but never in commercial production of edible onions. Through a calculated series of crosses and back-crosses, Mutschler and her colleagues spent years trying to get a few seeds. When they were finally able to announce a new, disease-resistant onion variety, Mutschler was also able to announce a genetics science discovery: “This segregation for superior seed production shows that sexual barriers are under genetic control and that fecundity is probably a recessive trait derived from the onion parent.”

Debuting three new wine grapes (‘Noiret,’ ‘Corot noir,’ and ‘Valin Muscat’) last year, the Geneva Station’s Bruce Reisch ’76 revealed their family history. He called the ‘Corot noir’ (a late-season red wine grape) a complex interspecific hybrid resulting from a 1970 cross between ‘Seyve-Villard 18-307’ and ‘Steuben.’ Thomas Henick-Kling, formerly at the Geneva Station, said the ‘Noiret’ “is richly colored and has notes of green and black pepper, with raspberry and mint aromas and a fine tannin structure.”

With all that going for it, does a wine grape really need a fancy name? Indeed, it does, said Reisch: “A bad name can hamper a good grape.”

The now-retired Geneva Station breeder, Roger D. Way, PhD ’53, knew that about apples when he searched for a catchy name for a variety introduced in 1972. He polled New York growers from the shores of Lake Ontario to the Hudson Valley. Way asked garden editors from Buffalo to Boston to ask their readers: What should Cornell call the apple that came from a cross, back in 1944, between the ‘Jonathan’ and the ‘MacIntosh?’ It was described as an early fall dessert apple that was also good for eating, and the variety called ‘N.Y. 44428’ rose from a 1955 planting of 2,474 seedlings. Out of 515 naming suggestions collected by Professor Way, seven people (including a schoolboy, eight-year-old Paul Wells) came up with ‘Jonamac.’ (Roger Segelken)