Red Delicious is a variety of apple with a red exterior and sweet taste. Known as "the Reds" in the industry, this variety is the result of a chance seedling. It was first recognized in Madison County
Modern Red Delicious apples tend to be uniformly red. But selection for redder fruit resulted in loss of flavor.
Empire is a clonally propagated cultivar of apple derived from a seed sown in 1945 by Lester C. Anderson, a Cornell University fruit nutritionist who conducted open pollination research on his various