Cider apple
Antoinette
A Norman bittersweet of moderate tannin and reliable habit, one of the cultivars that came through twentieth-century selection into modern French orchards.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bittersweet base, Bulk juice
- Origin
- Normandy
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
French cider apple families
Bittersweet · Douce-amère
Low acid with substantial tannin.
Basis: Tannin 2 to 3 g/L and acidity below 3 g/L as H₂SO₄.
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 | Low | |
| Tannin | Moderate | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
French bittersweet family placement.
A mild, rounded bitterness with low acid and a soft finish; nothing sharp anywhere in it.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Antoinette, 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
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Antoinette. Figures for this cultivar circulate, but they reach the present through compilation rather than through the original tables, and publishing a number we cannot attribute would give it an authority it has not earned. What is known about how the fruit behaves is described above and below.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Moderate tannin
- Low acid
- Consistent from year to year, which is unusual enough to be worth noting
How it is used
- Blending fruit in Normandy AOC and farm cider
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Sound and undistinguished alone.
About Antoinette
Antoinette belongs to the middle rank of Norman bittersweets: a fruit that does its job, keeps a mill supplied, and is very rarely singled out. Its tannin sits in the middle of the douce-amère family, its acid is low in the way all Norman bittersweets are low, and its cropping is regular enough for a commercial block.
Records like this are the majority of any national cultivar list, and it is worth being explicit about that. The named, celebrated cultivars — Binet Rouge, Kermerrien, Médaille d’Or — are a small minority of what is actually planted and pressed. Most cider, in Normandy as elsewhere, is made from competent fruit that nobody writes about.
The honest limit of what can be said here is the classification, the harvest window and the orchard behaviour. There is no verified analysis, no origin record, and no body of tasting description specific to the cultivar, and the record says so rather than filling the space.
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
A personal name of the kind attached to a seedling by whoever noticed it. No raiser and no date are recorded.
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.
Douce Moën
The workhorse of Breton cider orchards: a large, pale, very low-acid bittersweet that crops heavily, presses generously, and carries more Breton cider than any other single cultivar.
Michelin
A Norman bittersweet raised near Yvetot in the 1870s that became, in England rather than in France, one of the most widely planted cider apples in the world.
Bisquet
A reliable, regular-cropping Norman bittersweet planted heavily in modern orchards precisely because it does not do the one thing most traditional French cider apples do, which is crop every other year.
Domaines
A regular, well-behaved Norman bittersweet that has done well out of the shift to bush orchards, being one of the few traditional cultivars that suits intensive planting.
Rambault
A Norman bittersweet of moderate character and local reputation, one of the working cultivars of the Pays d’Auge without a wider following.
Bedan
A mild Norman bittersweet, planted more widely across the Domfrontais and the Pays d’Auge than almost any other traditional cultivar, and valued as much for how its juice keeves as for how it tastes.
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 the difference between french cidre and english cider — French cidre is usually sweeter, weaker and more carbonated, because fermentation is arrested while sugar remains. English cider is more often fermented dry and finished still or lightly sparkling, and is stronger for it.
- Which norman cider apple crops every year — Bisquet, more nearly than most. Traditional French cider apples are strongly biennial — a heavy crop one year and almost none the next — and Bisquet is planted across modern Norman orchards largely because it does not do that. It is a bittersweet chosen for the regularity of its cropping rather than for any special distinction in the glass.
- What is normandy cider
- What does cidre fermier mean
- What is the pays d auge — The Pays d’Auge is the heartland of Norman cider, a country of clay soils and standard orchards east of Caen. Its cider and its calvados both carry appellations of their own.
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.