To many people a mango is just a mango – a fruit that comes in summer and vanishes when it ends. But is a mango just a mango? Of course there are some for whom a mango is just a mango and any mango is as good as the other mango. 

This summer I found out that there are mangoes and there are mangoes. For many years now, I used to find that on some days when I ate mango I didn’t feel too good. My stomach used to churn with a peculiar kind of sourness and I always felt a peculiar after taste crawl slowly up my gullet. At first I thought it was just because of greed, when I ate more mango than I should have that caused this peculiar feeling – a combination of greed and guilt that made the Hydrochloric acid play up but this year when I actually discovered that there are mangoes and there are mangoes, the penny dropped.

There are all kinds of mangoes! And the mangoes that are devoured by the dozen in my family belong to the Alphonso variety, a mango with a skin so thin, the flesh so sweet and velvety, a smell so strong and intoxicating and a flavour that is unbeatable. These are the Devgad and Ratnagiri Alphonso but there is a difference between the two – a difference so small that only the experts can tell. Devgad mangoes actually come earlier in the season and are around for a short spell. They are by far the most superior of Alphonso , with a deeper rich orange and a skin that peels off easily. Naturally this is more expensive than the Ratnagiri variety. Ratnagiri is a district while Devgad is asubdivision in Sindhudurg district further, south of Ratnagiri. 

Well apart from these two traditional new rivals come more competitors – the Kesar and the Valsad Alphonso. While the valsad alphonso is the alphonso grown in Valsad district of Gujerat, Kesar is not an alphonso but a mango akin to Alphonso that grows in Maharashtra and Gujerat. This mango is slightly smaller than the king of fruit ( the alphonso) and has a deep apricot colour rather than the deep orange of the alphonso. These mangoes also come after the Ratnagiri and Devgad crop is over and according to me are much sweeter and less acidic.

For many people these are all the mangoes that are worth knowing but there are others which are equally good if not better( as some will swear) – the langda, the dusseri, the banganpalli, the chausa, the totapuri and may be many more which I don’t know about.

 So is a mango just a mango?