Since everybody has different taste, the only objective criteria I can think of are:
Mexico, USA, China, Thailand, Morocco immediately come to my mind.
What are your favorites?
The two times I’ve stayed more than a day in London I picked up some Kentish apples and some pears from somewhere around England (I don’t think it was Kent). While the pears were only a little better than the pears I find in America (only tasting slightly fresher), whatever variety of apples I found were much better than the American varieties I’ve had, being slightly less sweet and crisp and tart than the overblown extreme apples in America, and with more aroma. Furthermore, they were like the platonic ideal of an apple, being what I had in mind when I think of the word “apple”. (Much like Beaujolais tastes like what I thought wine was going to taste like before I tried any. Tannins and wood don’t conform to my preconceived notions of winetude!)
I know that 20+ years ago Israel was strongly into innovation in agriculture and fruit production, but don’t know how true that is now. If you like citrus, they’re a good destination. Their “Jaffa Sweeties”, a grapefruit/pomelo cross, are a favorite of mine.
A lot of fruit nowadays seems to come from Peru and Chile, but I don’t know whether individual consumers / tourists would have access to all the types of fruit that they export?
Fresh field-ripened pineapples, wherever they may be found!
My experience happens to be from Hawaii. I don’t know what fresh field-ripened pineapples are like elsewhere, but I assume they must be similar.
That reminds me, anyone who likes apples needs to go to an apple orchard with different varieties and eat them freshly picked from the tree. The best apples I ever had were at orchards in New York’s Hudson Valley. This is one place I visited in late September/early October which had at least 10 varieties of glorious apples bursting with flavor, as @Ludovic says, “like the platonic ideal of an apple”: http://duboisfarms.com/upick/
As a general rule, any vine-ripened, field-ripened, tree-ripened fruits or veggies will be profoundly better than the same foods harvested early and ripened afterward, as one commonly finds in the stores.
I lived in a house once with a peach tree in the neighbor’s yard, with branches overhanging my yard. Fresh tree-ripened peaches! I don’t even normally care much for peaches (store-bought), but those were delicious!
Road-side fruit stands often have the best produce you’ll find anywhere. In Hawaii, we used to get field-ripened pineapples from road-side stands out in the pineapple fields.
An anecdote: There was a skydiving club that did their thing out in a pineapple field. They had a large clearing in the middle of a field, which was their target landing area. I watched them for a few hours one day. There was a guy there doing his very first skydive. His steering wasn’t that great yet, and instead of landing in the target area, he landed in the pineapples. That looked painful. Do you know what a pineapple plant looks like? Every leaf is like a serrated knife.
Fruit here is amazing - if it’s in season. Don’t go looking for oranges in the summer or grapes in the winter. But as a rule, Israeli produce is good because people here take it very seriously, and buy for flavor, not for looks.
My mango loving coworkers say India, because of the Alphonso mango. Others would say Brazil, for different mangos, plus types of bananas and papayas that aren’t shipped.
For me, I would go to the Pacific Northwest because of Rainier cherries, Bing cherries, plums, peaches, pears, grapes, apples (not red delicious!) and berries. Raspberry, strawberry, blackberry, marionberry, cranberry, blueberry, loganberry, for example.
And melons.
Cherries and berries don’t travel well. If you want good ones, you have to go there. And there’s a lot more to apples than the ones which are shipped.
English seasonal strawberries and cherries are world-beating,I’m surrounded by fields of them but I’d quibble with the “bigger is better” statement. There is a sweet spot (literally) with most fruit beyond which you have limited returns, certainly in terms of practicality.
Hardly one for general tourism, but I’ve been to the apple and cherry open days/festivals at Brogdale the UK’s national fruit collections: a fantastic opportunity to learn about (and taste) all sorts of fabulously-named fruit.
I love soursop, but even in the Caribbean it is hard to find, usually at roadside stands.
I may have to return to central Ohio to revisit Lynd Fruit Farm, and fire an Apple Cannon.
Spain for me. Figues, almonds and peaches from Lérida, citrus in Levante, Melons in most coastal regions, cherries from Jerte, bananas from the Canaries, apples from Asturias, pistachios from Ciudad Real, I could go on and on and on… And they started cultivating mangoes and papayas and similar fruits in Sierra Nevada, and it works! (What took them so long!!!).
If tomatoes are fruit, the best ones should be in Spain too, after the magnificent ones in the slopes of the Vesuv.
I love fruit and could live on it, so I’m saying SEAsia by a mile!
Amazing fruits you’ve never ever seen, tasted or dreamt of, yummy!
Mangosteens, Salak, Rhambutans, are just the tip of the iceberg!
And easily the best pineapples and mangos. Plus, fresh over ice watermelon, passionfruit or sugarcane juice are available on most every street corner.
It’s fruit heaven in my humble opinion.
You forgot Cherimoya. Had some tree-ripened ones in Motril that, even hard, were sweet enough to be eaten like an apple if you peeled them.
And Melocotones (Apricots) as big as peaches and better than any I’ve had anywhere in the world.
as September moves on, my daily cycle ride through the narrow back lanes of Kent turns into an apple open day.
The orchard farm houses sprout baskets of apples and honesty boxes and I’ll take a little backpack and some loose change (10p an apple!)
Egremont Russets are my favourite but are rare indeed.
I don’t think Japan would qualify as a fruit tourism destination (and I didn’t even know that was a thing) but if you ever find yourself in Japan in the mid summer you should get a pack of seedless pione purple grapes. It will cost about 10 bucks and you will get about 25 big grapes on a vine and then diabetes.
If they are firm, I shall. I love hard, crunchy grapes.
This thread suddenly reminds me of the children’s book Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey.
We had great soursop and many many other fruits during our two week stay in Costa Rica back in 2020, just before covid hit. The resort we stayed at offered a different fruit soup every day, and we were always excited to see what they’d serve next. Plus their endless fruit buffet . . .
They had mamon chino, passionfruit, starfruit, peach palms, guava, tamarinds, dragonfruit, plus lots of the more mundane (but delicious) pineapple.