Cider apple
Cartigny
A hard northern French bitter apple of the type used in small proportion for phenolic concentration, now uncommon and thinly documented.
- Classification
- Bitter — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure, Late season
- Origin
- Northern France
- 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.
Placed in the bitter family; the record for this cultivar is thin enough that the placement should be read as a working classification rather than a settled one.
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 | Medium |
Description in French orchard practice as a hard bitter apple, with no analysis and no widely agreed classification behind it.
Hard and astringent, with the drying grip that characterises the French bitter family and little else to report.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Cartigny, 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 Cartigny. 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
- Late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
Juice and pressing
- High tannin
- Low sugar
- Low nitrogen
How it is used
- Tannin correction in Norman and Picard farm blends
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
There is no tradition of bottling it alone and no reason to expect the result would be balanced.
About Cartigny
Cartigny is included here as an honest example of the thinly documented tail of French cider fruit. It is a hard bitter apple, it is used the way hard bitter apples are used, and beyond that the record is meagre. There is no raiser, no date, and no analysis that CiderHQ can verify.
That thinness is itself worth recording rather than papering over. French cider cultivar lists run to several hundred names, most of them attached to fruit known from a handful of orchards in a single département. Standard references describe perhaps thirty of them in any detail; the rest are names with a family label attached. A knowledge base that describes all of them with equal confidence is inventing most of what it says.
What can be said is functional. A fruit in the amère family goes into a blend at a small percentage, contributes bitterness and astringency out of proportion to its volume, and is not expected to supply sugar or acid. Cartigny is used that way, and a grower who has it will treat it interchangeably with any other local bitter.
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 matches communes in both Normandy and the Somme, and the fruit has been attributed to each. Neither attribution rests on more than the coincidence of names.
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.
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.
Fréquin Audièvre
A member of the Norman Fréquin group of hard bitter apples, distinguished from Fréquin Rouge locally and not always distinguished from it in the nursery trade.
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.
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 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 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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.