Today the weather was pleasant and provided a nice setting for the pomegranate tasting event put on by the USDA National Clonal Germplasm Repository at the Wolfskill farm near Winters California.  Greenhouse manager Jeff Moersfelder organized the even with help of other employees with additional help by Barbara Baer and yours truly (I helped shuck arils yesterday).  Curator Ed Stover told the group that this will be the last such tasting since they have reached out to hobbyists, etc. about as much as they can.  He suggested that people that liked particular cultivars should contact nurseries and request these cultivars so that material can be made more widely available.

We tasted 21 cultivars today.  I didn't take notes of all of them and don't have a complete list.  I met David Silverstein for the first time today and other group members Barbara Baer and Joe Real were also there today.  I also met Phil Pieri who is a member of another Yahoo group ("rarefruit") and they will probably add to my comments here.

PARS Produce owner Khodadad also brought along his Pomegranate of Saveh fruit to sample.  He reported to me earlier in the year and confirmed today again through his translator (husband of his secretary/bookkeeper) that Paramount Farms has purchased 70,000 trees of this variety from him in the last few years.  He stated he was sold out through 2008, though he could meet small orders of up to 20 trees per customer.  He also reported that he had larger fruits of this variety which were shipped to Japan and sold for $25 each.  I have no way to verify these claims.

Here are my brief notes of ones I tried and wrote about.  Some of these names may be misspelled from the original Turkmen names, but these are the name on record at the USDA.

DPUN0082 Sin Pepe - Large sweet arils with pleasant subtle flavor and very soft/small seeds.  This cultivar is also sometimes referred to as Pink Ice and is sold by Dave Wilson Nursery (and retailers selling their products) as Pink Satin.
DPUN0035 Vina - Somewhat similar to Sin Pepe, smaller arils, not quite as sweet.
DPUN0109 Medovyi Vahsha - Did not seem to have much flavor to me
DPUN0134 Myatadzhy - Nice flavor, dark red, sweet and soft
DPUN0151 Sirenevyi - Nice flavor, sweet and soft
DPUN0015 Parfianka - Very nice flavor, fair amount of sweetness, fairly soft seeds.  After all of the hype and build up expectations, it's hard not to be biased towards this one.
DPUN0113 15/4 Pamyati Rozanova - Soft and some nice flavors, but not sweet enough for me
DPUN0081 Wonderful - Flavor good, seeds are too hard after trying the above, not very sweet
DPUN0108 Desertnyi - Semi-soft, flavor okay, but very sweet.  I believe the fruti I tasted of this a few weeks ago was sweeter and more pleasant.
DPUN0105 Agat - Tart!  I didn't like this, though some people reportedly indicated they liked the flavor.  Hmmm...
DPUN0060 Al-sirin-nar - Nice flavor, good sweetnes, hard seeds.   Good choice for juice.
DPUN0086  Cranberry - A very nice flavored fruit with medium-sized hard seeds.  A popular one with many people I spoke with.
DPUN0167 Ink - Another one with nice flavor but harder seeds.

Pomegranate of Saveh - Nice flavor, could be sweeter, seeds were semi-soft (smaller than Wonderful), dark red.

Pink Tourmaline - a local selection from southern California that David Silverstein brough up.  David only had one fairly small fruit to share and I was glad to be able to be present when he gave out some samples.  It was small fruit and soft-seeded, sweet, and a very nice flavor that I struggled to describe.  I want to try growing this one.  Because of its small size, it doesn't have much commercial potenital, however.

I walked around the orchard and tried others and here are others I liked.  I had hands/arms full and don't have anything written on them except my mind, so here I will write before I lose my mind:
DPUN0073 Kazake - smaller fruit with very nice rich flavor, hard seeds
DPUN0038 Balegal - Sweet, nice flavor, fairly soft seeds
DPUN0093 Palermo - Nice rich flavor, semi-hard seeds (I think)
DPUN0164 Utah Sweet - hardly any fruit on these small trees, but they were sweet, soft-seeded, fairly nice flavor.

Since I have fruit I brought home with me, I'm certain I have some others that aren't written about up above and I will hopefully add to this list later.  I'm sorry, but I don't have more time to spend on this now as my other work is calling.  Maybe in a few days I'll have more time.

Harvey
Isleton, California