God Save the Snow Queens

“The Snow Queen white nectarine has everything wrong with it,” says Art Lange, the doyen of farmers market stone-fruit growers. “It cracks, it ripens unevenly on the tree, it bruises easily, it’s totally unsuited for commercial production. The reason I grow it is it tastes so darn good.”

In fact, many connoisseurs consider the Snow Queen, a variety of unknown parentage introduced by Armstrong Nurseries in 1975, to be the most exalted of stone fruits. Under the speckled, leathery skin, its melting, incredibly juicy white flesh offers a perfect balance of sweetness and acidity, and intense, complex, floral nectarine flavor, much more interesting than the taste of recent low-acid white nectarines, which are merely sweet.

Commercial growers may regard the speckling that marks many specimens to be a defect, but nectarine mavens know the freckles as “sugar spots,” likely indicators of fruit grown in a sunny spot on the tree, thus extra-sweet and flavorful.

Lange, a former plant physiologist from UC Davis, is spending his retirement growing to perfection the best varieties of stone fruit at his farm in Reedley, southeast of Fresno. His fruit is picked exquisitely ripe, packed in the field and sold at farmers markets around California, from San Diego to San Francisco. Lange has 400 trees of Snow Queens, probably the largest planting in the state, but the variety’s season is short, just the next week or so. Generally amiable, he turns gruff when customers roughly paw his delicate Snow Queens.

“I tell people I’m the Nectarine Nazi, he says. “Squeeze my fruit, and you won’t get any.”

Art Lange and his son Kurt sell Snow Queens at four local farmers markets: Santa Monica (Arizona Avenue and 2nd Street), Wednesdays 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Saturdays 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.; Westwood (Weyburn Avenue at Westwood Boulevard), Thursdays 2 to 7 p.m.; and Encino (17400 Victory Blvd. between Balboa Boulevard and White Oak Avenue), Sundays 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.