Cider apple
Fameuse
The historic apple of the St Lawrence valley, grown in New France from the seventeenth century, snow-white fleshed and delicately perfumed, and the probable parent of McIntosh.
Also written Snow Apple, Pomme de Neige, Chimney Apple.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Aroma, Bulk juice
- Origin
- The St Lawrence valley, in what was then New France
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Fameuse. That is common outside Europe: the English, French and Spanish systems were each built for their own fruit, and a cultivar grown where none of them applies simply has no class. What the fruit contributes to a blend is described below regardless — the class is a shorthand for that, not a substitute.
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 | Moderate | |
| Tannin | Negligible | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Pronounced | |
| Body | Light |
Long-standing Quebec and New England description of a delicately perfumed, white-fleshed, moderately acid apple. No juice analysis is registered.
Delicately perfumed with a light strawberry-like note, over a soft moderate acidity and very white, tender flesh.
Aroma
Descriptors associated with this fruit. Each names a character with a known cause, and association is not a promise — what reaches the glass depends on the ferment as much as on the apple.
- Apple blossom — A light, sweet floral note from terpene alcohols and 2-phenylethanol, distinct from the fruit character of the same tree.
- Fresh-cut apple — The smell of a cut apple surface, produced within seconds of the fruit tissue being broken by six-carbon aldehydes released from membrane fats.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Fameuse. 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
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Bruises easily and does not keep; it has to be handled gently and pressed promptly.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Apple scab | high | Severely scab-prone, and it was scab as much as anything that ended Fameuse’s commercial career in Quebec. |
| Winter cold injury | low | Hardy enough for the St Lawrence valley, which is why it was the apple of New France at all. |
Juice and pressing
- A delicate perfume that is the ancestor of the McIntosh aroma and rather more subtle than it.
- Moderate acid and modest sugar.
- No tannin.
How it is used
- The staple apple of Quebec from the French colonial period until the twentieth century.
- Pressed for Quebec farm cider and, since the 1990s, used in ice cider and craft blends.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Made occasionally in Quebec as a heritage bottling. The perfume is genuine and the cider is light, soft and short; it is a historical statement as much as a sensory one.
About Fameuse
Quebec has the oldest continuous apple culture in North America, older than New England’s, and Fameuse is its founding fruit. It was grown around Montreal and along the St Lawrence from the French colonial period, and for two hundred years it was simply what an apple was in that part of the world. The white flesh gave it its English name; the French name, pomme de neige, is still current.
Its cider role has always been aromatic. The perfume is delicate, faintly strawberry-like, and recognisably the same family of aroma that McIntosh carries in a louder register — which is the main reason Fameuse is generally accepted as McIntosh’s parent. A Fameuse cider is light, soft, short and unmistakably scented, and Quebec producers make it as a heritage statement about where their orchard culture came from.
It lost its commercial position to scab, to which it is severely susceptible, and to McIntosh, which does the same thing more robustly. That is a common shape in this file: a heritage cultivar displaced by its own more vigorous offspring, and surviving because a revival movement went looking for it.
It is worth noting what Quebec did not have. There was no French cider-apple tradition transplanted to New France — no bittersweets, no Norman classification, no keeving. Quebec cider was made from whatever hardy fruit would grow, and its modern identity was built in the 1990s around ice cider, a technique the climate made possible rather than a cultivar inheritance.
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
Two accounts compete: that Fameuse was raised in New France from French seed, and that it was a French cultivar carried across intact. Neither has been established, and the fruit has no confirmed European counterpart.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Snow Apple | Regional name | Ontario and New England. The English name, from the very white flesh. |
| Pomme de Neige | Regional name | Quebec. The French name, in continuous use in the St Lawrence valley. |
| Chimney Apple | Historic spelling | Vermont and northern New York. |
Why it matters
- The oldest continuously grown apple in Canada, and the fruit around which Quebec’s orchard culture originally formed.
- Almost certainly the parent of McIntosh, and therefore an ancestor of Cortland, Empire, Spartan, Lobo and much else.
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.
Browns Apple
The standard Devon sharp: a bright red, heavy-cropping, high-acid apple with almost no tannin, and the fruit most English blends reach for when they need lift.
Golden Delicious
A West Virginia chance seedling of about 1890 that became one of the most planted and most bred-from apples in history — high in sugar, low in acid, and by volume one of the largest single inputs to cider worldwide.
McIntosh
The defining apple of eastern Canada and northern New England — an Ontario seedling of about 1811 whose perfumed, high-acid juice is the aromatic foundation of most Quebec and northeastern cider.
Braeburn
A New Zealand chance seedling found near Motueka in the 1950s, sharper and denser than most modern dessert apples, and one of the better commercial cultivars available to a cider blender.
Cortland
A 1898 Geneva cross of Ben Davis and McIntosh, released in 1915, whose flesh browns unusually slowly — a property that made it a salad apple and makes its juice unusually resistant to oxidative browning.
Empire
A 1945 Geneva cross of McIntosh and Red Delicious released in 1966, firmer than either parent and widely planted across the northeast, contributing aroma and moderate acid to blends.
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 apples is quebec cider made from — McIntosh above all. It is to eastern Canada what a bittersweet is to Somerset — the assumed default — and its perfumed, high-acid juice is the aromatic foundation of most Quebec and northeastern cider.
- What does fresh-cut apple mean in a cider tasting note — The smell of a cut apple surface, produced within seconds of the fruit tissue being broken by six-carbon aldehydes released from membrane fats.
- What is ice cider — Ice cider is made by concentrating apple juice by freezing before fermentation, so that the ferment starts from a very high sugar level and stops sweet. It is a Quebec speciality with a protected definition there.
- How is ice cider made — Apple juice is frozen and the sugar-rich liquid separated from the ice, either by freezing pressed juice or by leaving fruit on the tree into winter. Fermentation then stops of its own accord well before the concentrated sugar is used up.
- What makes a cider taste of apple blossom
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.
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.
University of Vermont cider research
University of Vermont Extension · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own
Ben Watson, The Countryman Press, first edition 1999; third edition 2013 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: first published 1999 by The Countryman Press, with five editions recorded and a 2008 printing scanned by the Internet Archive as ciderhardsweethi0000benw. The scan is access-restricted to the print-disabled collection. The site had registered this without a year; it now carries one, and the first-edition date matters because a general trade book on cider written in 1999 predates almost the whole of the North American cider revival it is sometimes cited about.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.