Cortland, Fuji, or Macintosh for me, thanks
the envy variety is delightful. a dense yet crisp bite, ample juice, with a good balance of sweetness and tartness. on the back-end are notes in the vicinity of vanilla without actually entering the town.
honeycrisp, braeburn, and eve are also on my short list.
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So nice, a certain company named their big idea after it:
Gala (or Jazz), Golden Delicious (or Opal if they’re around), Fuji, Rome, and Pacific Rose are all good . Even Red Delicious aren’t so bad if they’re not covered in ten layers of wax. Supermarkets in the US love that stuff, and it makes apples absolutely disgusting.
I’m a Pink Lady boy, myself. Errh, that came out wrong. Wait, came out? I like Pink Ladies. Crap, now this is veering.
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IronEdithKidd, that mouth reaction sounds like a possible case of Oral Allergy Syndrome. I’ve got the same thing with a bunch of fresh fruits. It happens when your immune system mistake proteins in fruit for pollen allergens. There are cross-reactions between specific fruits and specific pollen. For example if you’re allergic to tree pollen (like birch/alder), you may have a reaction when eating apples. Peeling and cooking fruit helps to prevent reactions. I get the mouth reaction, especially behind my top front teeth when eating fresh apples, peaches, pears, cantaloupes and many others.
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I love, love, love Arkansas Blacks, Stayman winesaps, Roxbury Russets, Ashmead’s Kernels, and Calville Blancs. In fact, it’s getting to be that time of year. A trip to the heirloom orchard is in order. Y’all can keep your super-sweet supermarket crunchy things. Gimme some bitterness, tartness, and spicy flavors.
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YOU, sir or madam, are making me WANT SOME GOSH DANG HEIRLOOM APPLES, I tell ya.
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I’m in England. It is September. Soon. Soon will come the goodness. Oh, yuss.
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Homemade calvados?
…we’re all just one opensource Raman spectrometer away from having safe stills…
I like @shaddack’s suggestion better, but I recall that when my sister and I got some red delicious apples we would stuff them with cinnamon and other junk and then bake them (basically, solid applesauce).
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There is no apple but the one apple: Honeycrisp. However, in a pinch I do like a Macintosh for the nostalgia. Viva la Honeycrisp! (I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I read somewhere that %95 of Honeycrisps are sold in Minnesota. We only grow about half, but buy most of them.) I am very worried that the recent hail storm in Minnesota is going to put a crimp in my Honeycrisp eating this year.
I’ve gotten hooked an Macoun these past couple of years. Like a Macintosh but crisper.
Actually, the spelling suggests the computer was named after a raincoat, not a variety of fruit.
Fresh off the tree, my favorite was a Winesap, a variety that seems to have nearly disappeared. Maybe I’m romanticizing, but I remember it as tart and aromatic with none of the unpleasant perfumy bitterness of Red Delicious. Of course, straight off the tree Jonathan and Yellow Delicious (slandered by its namesake Red Delicious) do pretty well too.
Winesaps are as good as you remember. If there were one breed of apple left on the planet, I’d want it to be a winesap.
Most people look at me like I’m from another planet if ever mention it. Same reaction occurs with raw carrots, raw green beans and macadamia nuts. I always assumed they shared some chemical in common that was causing the itching. And yeah, cooking completely eliminates the reaction.
I finally found a fellow sufferer. 
I’d be OK with winesaps. I’m partial to Pink Ladies, though.
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