Cider apple
Amère de Berthecourt
A bitter apple from the Picard borderlands north-east of Normandy, used in the small proportions its name implies and now rare.
Also written Amere de Berthecourt, Amère de Berthécourt.
- Classification
- Bitter — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure
- Origin
- Berthecourt, Oise, Picardy
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
French cider apple families
Bitter · Amère
Very high tannin with low acid — more tannic than the bittersweet family and used in smaller proportion.
Basis: Tannin above 3 g/L and acidity below 3 g/L as H₂SO₄.
Named for its class, which is unusual and convenient.
Every classification on CiderHQ names its system. Why there is more than one.
What it contributes to a blend
A direction, not a measurement. These bands are the level of resolution the evidence supports, and they say which way adding this fruit pushes a blend rather than what the finished cider will be.
| Axis | Typical | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Acid | Very low | |
| Tannin | Heavy | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Dominant | |
| Astringency | Harsh | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Medium |
French bitter family placement.
Severely astringent with a flat, unlifted bitterness and almost no fruit character to speak of.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Amère de Berthecourt, and for a great deal of cider fruit that is a finding rather than a gap. Bittersweet apples in particular contribute tannin, sugar and body while being close to aromatically mute, and most of what a cider made from them smells of was produced by the fermentation rather than carried in by the fruit. CiderHQ publishes the absence rather than filling the space with descriptors nothing supports.
Measured analysis
Each figure is shown with where and when it was taken. They are not averaged: the same cultivar grown in another climate genuinely gives different numbers, and collapsing them into one would be the most misleading thing this page could do.
Fruit weight82 g
New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York, USA, late 1970s · Mean fruit weight as published. The compiler notes that a typical New York dessert apple weighs about 140 g, so most of these are small fruit — which is normal for cider cultivars and is itself the point of the column. · AVI / Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1989, edited by Donald L. Downing (ISBN 0-442-22117-7)
Reaches CiderHQ through a transcription of a 1989 food-technology chapter, which itself printed unpublished 1980 work from the station. Unlike the chemistry in this dataset it is a measurement of the fruit rather than of the finished cider, so it is comparable with other fruit weights.
Mass of a single fruit. Measured in grams.
Total acid (finished cider)0.230 % w/v
New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York, USA, late 1970s · Titration, reported as malic acid. Analysis of finished cider. · AVI / Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1989, edited by Donald L. Downing (ISBN 0-442-22117-7)
Measured on finished cider after a spontaneous fermentation, not on juice. It is not comparable with a juice figure for the same cultivar, and the gap between the two is not a disagreement between laboratories — it is what fermentation did.
Acid measured after fermentation. Kept apart from the juice figure because malolactic conversion and yeast acid production both move it. Measured in percent weight per volume.
pH (finished cider)4.08 pH
New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York, USA, late 1970s · Meter on finished cider. · AVI / Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1989, edited by Donald L. Downing (ISBN 0-442-22117-7)
Measured on finished cider after a spontaneous fermentation, not on juice. It is not comparable with a juice figure for the same cultivar, and the gap between the two is not a disagreement between laboratories — it is what fermentation did.
Acid strength after fermentation, which is what governs microbial risk and sulphite behaviour in the vessel rather than in the press. Measured in ph.
Total tannin (finished cider)0.169 % w/v
New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York, USA, late 1970s · Method not stated by the source, which is a real limitation: different tannin methods give wildly different figures on the same sample. · AVI / Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1989, edited by Donald L. Downing (ISBN 0-442-22117-7)
Measured on finished cider after a spontaneous fermentation, not on juice. It is not comparable with a juice figure for the same cultivar, and the gap between the two is not a disagreement between laboratories — it is what fermentation did. The compiler notes these tannin figures run at roughly half the Long Ashton juice figures for the same cultivars, and cannot say how much of that is fermentation, how much is Geneva, and how much is method.
Phenolic load measured after fermentation, routinely well below the juice figure for the same fruit because fermentation, fining and time remove phenolic material. Measured in percent weight per volume.
Compare within a study to see where these figures sat among the other cultivars the same work analysed — which is a more robust statement than the figures themselves, because absolute values move between laboratories and the ordering inside one study mostly survives.
Watched in the orchard
What named research programmes recorded about this fruit at their own sites. Bloom, harvest and cropping belong to a place and a run of seasons rather than to a cultivar, so they are reported site by site rather than merged.
NYSAES Geneva cider cultivar analyses
New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York · late 1970s · AVI / Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1989, edited by Donald L. Downing (ISBN 0-442-22117-7)
Humid continental, with a hotter summer and a colder winter than any European cider region. The compiler suggests the growing conditions may be part of why the phenolic figures sit so far below the English ones, and is careful not to claim it.
- Held as
- Listed as “Amere de Berthecourt”
Analysis of finished cider after a spontaneous fermentation. Acid by titration as malic; pH by meter; tannin by an unstated method; fruit weight as a mean. The data appear to come from a single season, and the original work was unpublished.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
Juice and pressing
- Very high tannin
- Very low acid
- Low nitrogen, keeves readily
How it is used
- Tannin concentration in blends of the Oise and the Norman border country
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
Used at a few per cent for a reason.
About Amère de Berthecourt
Amère de Berthecourt carries its classification in its name, which is a useful accident. It is a bitter apple from Picardy, on the north-eastern fringe of the French cider country, where orchards thinned out as the land turned to arable and where cider-making has largely disappeared.
Its use follows the pattern of the whole amère family: a small fraction of a blend, added for phenolic concentration, with the sugar and acid supplied entirely by other fruit. Because the class is used in such small amounts, cultivars within it are more interchangeable than they look — a maker short of one bitter will substitute another without much altering the result.
Its rarity now is a function of geography rather than of quality. The cider districts of Picardy and the Oise contracted sharply through the twentieth century, and a local bitter apple with no presence in Normandy or Brittany had nowhere to retreat to.
Names, origin and identity
Cultivar naming is the hardest problem in cider fruit data. The same tree carries different names across ten miles, and two different trees have shared a name for two centuries.
Origin · traditional account
The name attaches the fruit to a specific commune, which is a stronger origin indication than most in this file, but no raiser or date is on record.
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Fruit that plays a similar part
Cultivars sharing a classification under the same system and a comparable role in a blend. Not a similarity score — a stated relationship.
Fréquin Rouge
A small, hard, deeply tannic Norman bitter apple that gives a French blend its grip, and the most widely planted member of a whole family of local Fréquins that are not all the same fruit.
Kermerrien
The Breton bitter apple most often named on a bottle: firmly tannic, distinctly aromatic, and one of the few French cider cultivars with a genuine claim to standing alone.
Marie Ménard
A small, dark red Breton apple with among the highest polyphenol contents of any cultivar in French cider use, planted in small quantity and used in smaller proportion still.
Vilberie
A very late Norman bittersweet grown widely in England, carrying tannin at the top of the range and ripening after almost everything else has been pressed.
Avrolles
A hard, very late French bitter apple, one of the group brought to England in the 1880s import wave and analysed there, and now scarce on both sides of the Channel.
Cartigny
A hard northern French bitter apple of the type used in small proportion for phenolic concentration, now uncommon and thinly documented.
Where it grows
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- How do you blend cider
- What is keeving — Keeving is a technique for starving a ferment of nitrogen so that it stops before all the sugar is gone, leaving a naturally sweet cider. Pectin is made to gel and float as a brown cap, carrying nutrients and yeast out of the juice with it.
- What is maceration in cider making — Maceration is letting milled pomace stand before pressing, so that enzymes soften the tissue and phenolics and aroma move from the skins into the juice. It raises both colour and tannin, and raises the risk of oxidation with them.
- What is normandy cider
- What does cidre fermier mean
- What is marie menard
Where to go next
- How cider apples are classified — Why there are four schemes and none of them is universal.
- The blend explorer — See which way changing the proportions moves a blend.
- Blending — What a cider maker is actually deciding when they build a blend.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles (IFPC)
IFPC · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The French technical institute for cider production. The authority for the French cultivar classification families, for keeving as an industrial process, and for the pectin and nitrogen chemistry that keeving depends on.
Expert reference Evidence standard for this record. What that means.