Cider apple
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.
Also written Avrolle.
- Classification
- Bitter — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Very late (November onwards)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure, Late season
- Origin
- Northern France
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 5
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
How it is classified
Classified under more than one system. The systems use different thresholds and were built for different fruit, so the answers can legitimately differ — that is a fact about the schemes, not a contradiction.
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.
Long Ashton classification
Bittersweet
Low acid, high tannin. The class that has no real equivalent in dessert fruit and that defines West Country cider.
Basis: Below about 0.45% w/v acid and above about 0.2% w/v tannin.
Assessed in Trees imported to England in the 1880s and analysed at Long Ashton in the first half of the twentieth century..
A textbook instance of the same fruit landing in different boxes: the English scheme has no bitter class above bittersweet, so everything from the French amère family arrives as a bittersweet by default.
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 | Firm | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Marked | |
| Astringency | Drying | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Full |
Dual classification under the French bitter family and the Long Ashton bittersweet class.
Very hard, very dry, with an almost woody bitterness and little aromatic interest.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Avrolles, 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 Avrolles. 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
- Very late
- Flowering
- Pollination group 5
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
Among the latest French cider apples; picked in November and often left until after the first frosts.
Will hold in a shed into the new year, which is the practical reason it was planted.
Very late-flowering.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Canker | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- High tannin
- Low sugar for a late apple
- Low nitrogen
How it is used
- Extending the pressing season into December
- Tannin in late Norman blends
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
Harsh and unbalanced alone, with too little sugar to carry its own tannin.
About Avrolles
Avrolles is chiefly interesting now for what it demonstrates about classification. It came to England with the Norman imports of the 1880s, was grown in trial orchards, and was analysed at Long Ashton, where it was recorded as a bittersweet — because the English scheme has only four boxes and no separate class for fruit more tannic than a bittersweet. In France it sits in the amère family, alongside fruit that no English grower would confuse with Dabinett or Yarlington Mill. Neither statement is wrong; they are answers to different questions.
Its practical value was its lateness. A cultivar that hangs into November and stores into the new year lets a mill spread its pressing over months rather than weeks, which mattered a great deal when presses were slow and labour was seasonal. As pressing capacity increased through the twentieth century that advantage evaporated, and very late cultivars with unremarkable juice were among the first casualties.
It is now uncommon in French commercial orchards and rare in England, surviving mainly in collections. Where it is encountered, its low sugar is worth noting: it is a fruit that supplies tannin without supplying much to ferment, which limits how much of a blend it can occupy even if a maker wants the phenolics.
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 points to the commune of Avrolles in the Yonne, but the fruit’s association with Normandy in the English record is stronger than any documented link to Burgundy, and the connection is not established.
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.
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.
Dabinett
The most widely planted English cider apple: a small, late-ripening bittersweet whose soft, full tannin ferments into a cider that needs almost nothing added to it.
Yarlington Mill
A vigorous Somerset bittersweet, conical and red-striped, giving a cider with more aromatic lift than most of its class and a reputation for fruitiness that the tannin figures do not explain.
Chisel Jersey
A hard, high-tannin Somerset bittersweet used in small proportion for structure, and one of the fruit most often reached for when a blend needs backbone rather than bulk.
Harry Masters’ Jersey
A medium bittersweet from the Yarlington district, valued for tannin that is full without being harsh, and among the more reliable croppers in a class that is generally unreliable.
Styles it is characteristic of
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.
- How long can apples be kept before pressing
- What does sweating apples mean — Sweating is holding picked fruit in a heap or store for days or weeks before milling, so it softens, loses water and gains sugar concentration. Perry pears in particular are usually held until they yield to the thumb.
- What is normandy cider
- What is frequin rouge
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.
Long Ashton Research Station cider fruit analyses
National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol · research institute · registered as competent for this subject · covers 1903–2003
The foundational body of cider-fruit science in English. Long Ashton produced the acid-and-tannin classification that divides cider apples into sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp, and analysed hundreds of cultivars grown at its Somerset site. Its figures are historic measurements of specific fruit at a specific place, not universal constants — a distinction CiderHQ preserves in every measurement record that cites it.
University of Reading / Defra, Brogdale · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The UK national reference collection for apple and pear cultivars. The authority CiderHQ uses for whether two names are the same fruit, which is the central duplicate-resolution problem in cider data.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.