Are the cherries themselves comparable to sweet cherries in taste?
They are sour by nature being 4x hybrid and recombination of of Sweet P.Avium and Mongolia cherry P. Frutcosa.
They have a gene pattern of AFFF or 25% sweet 75% Mongolian
a Sour cherry has a gene pattern of AAFF.
There sugar content can be as high as many sweet cherrys but the sourness masks that aspect.
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I’ve only eaten one or two, because the birds and chipmunks get them before they ripen. (But I have a new cage this year – hope springs eternal) But those I’ve eaten did not have the striking “cherryness” of a good cherry – not of either a sweet cherry nor a typical sour cherry. I was pretty disappointed.
Note that the very tastiest cherry I’ve had was a black cherry. There were some giant mature trees where I lived in Princeton, and they dropped a few ripe fruits each year. The flesh was only a couple mm thick over the large stone, and it wasn’t very sweet. It was a little bitter, in fact. But oh, the flavor! The cherryness of it. Yum! I wish i could get those again.
The flavor of my carmine jewel was fine, in a bland, sweet & sour way. But nothing to get excited about. Maybe they are better fully ripe?
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Too bad, I would have tried these sooner or later but sourness is a no no to my taste buds. The cherries in the tree I have here taste like cranberries. Not what I was hoping for.
I guess they’d need to add more P. avium genes in the mix. Zone 5 sweet cherries exist already so maybe one day.
Whereas I LOVE sour fruit. In fact, I keep unsweetened freeze-dried cranberries around to add to my breakfast cereal. (they are also super in muffins, but need to be soaked briefly, first.) All my favorite apples are sour. (usually with a lot of sugar, too.) In fact, my mom tells me that when I was a toddler, they would give me their lemon slices at restaurants, because I liked to eat them.
So I was mostly disappointed that these lack flavor intensity.
Sour cherries are the processing cash crop. Almost nothing is made with sweet cherries there virtually all eaten fresh. University of Saskatchewan in Canada’s goal is a more cold hardy sour cherry. They did truly succeed in raising the sugar level over standard sour cherry but you can just taste sour stronger then sweet. Sweet cherry has to be one of the most unique tastes in nature. Only one other fruit I have read about is supposed to taste like a red sweet cherry, let alone a yellow one.
Lets also give a shout out the other unicorn fruit. The Avium Cherry plum hybrid. Plum dominates cherry.
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Haha, lemon is extreme. I love sour apples as well but they also have some fruitiness to them. Which hardiness zone are you at? You might find the flavor profile in some other variety. I was under the impression that these Canadian ones were the sweetest so I might not add another tree.
I was surprised to see they had succeeded in making that plum cross. I would have thought they’re too distant relatives.
I think the only route to a truly sweet sour cherry (if it can be called that at that point) would be crossing with tetraploid sweet cherries. You of course lose some hardiness in the process but some hybrids are already out there. It’s always a compromise.
There is a name for AAAF its Duke Cherries. Several dozen cultivars where develop one study compared 39 with sweet and sours to just to standardize morphology. But at the end of the day Duke’s are not as popular since the average consumer wants there cherry to be sweet or sour not quasi middle ground.
The Nadia was 1 of 5 successful crosses out of 200 seeds collected.
The commonality with these fruits is they all originality from crosses of market ready fruits. I bet you just about every duke cherry is 1 or 2 gen removed from Montmorency.
Nadia is a cross of Black Amber a perfectly good black plum with amber flesh for those crates of black plums, no one on the forum would eat, and an Australian cultivar supreme.
If I where doing it I would find a cherry that over express’s flavor components and cross it with a honey plum like Shiro,
Im sure U o S selected for the highest sugar content Mongolian cherry first before crossing it with sweet. otherwise they would not have gotten that much suger from 3 sets of Mongolian genes.
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Did you pick them when they were very dark? They are at their best flavor when very dark. I have about 25 Carmine Jewel that we planted 5-6 years ago. Planning to sever the suckers from the mother this spring and dig them up in the fall to replant. The suckers are great if you want extra bushes (or trees depending on how you do or don’t prune), and they are nothing that a lawn mower can’t take care of.
I’m in zone 6, but I bought them because they are supposed to be a very small tree, not for the hardiness. And my Carmine Jewel is now entirely enclosed in a cage that’s about 4’x5’x8’. Which is why I hope I might get a couple of cherries this year.
I’ve had a couple of under-ripe ones, plus ONE that looked pretty ripe last year. I built the cage last year, but most of the fruit grew outside it, as I hadn’t previously finished it and let the branches grow through the parts that were finished. This year all the blossoms are inside the cage, and as soon as they drop, I will close up the door (left open so the bees can get in easily) and hope I actually harvest some ripe fruit. I guess we’ll find out.
If this works, I will prune it heavily again this year, in the hopes of getting it to grow more densely within the cage. 
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Alternatively, if this works and I don’t like the fruit very much, I may just cut it down and put a pair of blueberries in the cage.
Oh wow, in addition to some suckers near the plant, and in the lawn, i have what looks like some very awkwardly placed suckers!
First photo shows the steps between the suckers (to the left) and the tree (in the cage, just barely in the image, to the right )
Here’s a closeup of one sucker
And of the other.
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Yes, some cherry rootstocks sprout up 50 feet even from the parent tree.
Could graft to a pie cherry I suppose.
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