It’s taken eight years to perfect, but apple experts at the Swiss family fruit company Lubera have created a sparkling apple variety that feels like a fizzy soft drink when you eat it. The variety, called Paridis Sparkling, was bred using two existing varieties of apple. The first variety used is called Resi, which is a sweet-tasting variety from East Germany, and it was accidentally cross-bred with another variety, called Pirouette, in a Lubera orchard.

According to Robert Maierhofer, production manager at Lubera, he noticed some “ugly” apples growing from this little crossbred tree one day in 2006, and decided to taste one. “I said, ‘I want to try this ugly one, it could be a nice one’, and I tasted it, and it was wonderful,” he says in the video below. “It was the combination of big, big cells, and very firm cell walls, and it was just exploding the juice in your mouth.”

While the effervescent, yellow flesh of the Paradis Sparkling apparently tastes sour, sweet and tangy, the one downside of the variety is it grows in very irregular sizes and colours. Maierhofer says this will make it difficult for the variety to really take off as a commercial fruit, and sees it more of a variety for people to grow in their own gardens and orchards. He’s now selling sapling trees for £34 ($55), and Lubera will be selling the apples around Europe from early next year.

Source: SPLOID, Lubera