One of the weird things about apples is that every seed contains very different DNA than whatever it came from.

It sounds like that was just a random variation that someone planted. Did the apples taste any good? If they had, you might have been able to sell them. It's very possible that particular variety of apple will never exist again.

How is this unique to Apples? Most fruit trees come from clones. If you buy local the clones will be grafted onto a rootstock that matches your zone. A lot of vegetable seeds are unlikely to produce identical plants from seeds, especially if you have multiple squashes. Hass avocados are clones from the original tress a farmer found in the early 1900s.

Yeah in our garden we plant chili peppers, Anaheim, jalapeno etc. Tried replanting seeds one year, and while the fruit looked (mostly) like the parent plant, the heat was all over the map. It was chili roulette!

I had a few Franken-squash take over my garden one year. They even seeded themselves. The place I order seeds from will even warn you if the peppers can be cross pollinated easily.

Yeah...I've had some really odd 'volunteers' come up the year after planting mixes of squashes. Melons are are apparently notorious for crossing as well.

According to a professional pepper farming acquaintance, if you do this for a couple of generations, the heat mostly disappears and the taste becomes bland. They go to some lengths to prevent cross-pollination.

How are varieties consistently reproduced then? Cuttings/grafting?

I think most apple varieties intended for mass orchard production are clone cuttings grafted onto dwarfing rootstock. The clone produces consistent fruit, and the dwarfing rootstock produces easily harvested trees.

So sad to hear it's gone. There might have been some interest in propagating it, if for no other reason than cross breeding.

Curious about the taste.

Wolf River apples can be very large, but they're not dark, at least not the ones I've seen.