Cider apple
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.
Also written Frequin Audievre, Fréquin Audièvres.
- 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
- Normandy
- 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.
A bitter, like the rest of the Fréquin group.
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 |
Family placement in French practice; the individual cultivar is not separately analysed in anything CiderHQ can verify.
Hard, dry and strongly astringent in the Fréquin manner, with little to separate it from its relatives on the palate.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Fréquin Audièvre, 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 Fréquin Audièvre. 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 nitrogen
- Low acid
How it is used
- Tannin in Norman blends, used in small proportion
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
The same objection as the rest of the group: all grip, no lift.
About Fréquin Audièvre
Fréquin Audièvre is recorded separately from Fréquin Rouge because French practice records it separately, not because CiderHQ can distinguish the two with confidence. The Fréquins are the clearest example in Norman pomology of a family name doing duty as a cultivar name, and the practical consequence is that a block planted from a nineteenth-century nursery order is very unlikely to be genetically uniform.
What can be said applies to the group. Fréquins are hard, late, strongly tannic, low in acid and low in assimilable nitrogen; they keeve well, they are used in small proportions, and they are among the fruit that gives Norman cider its phenolic weight. Any statement finer than that, about this cultivar specifically, would be a guess.
Modern identification work using DNA fingerprinting has begun to sort out comparable tangles in other national collections. Until something equivalent is published for the Fréquins, the honest position is that the group is real, the individual boundaries are uncertain, and the trees in old Norman orchards are a mixture.
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
One of several named Fréquins. Whether the Fréquins are related as seedlings of a common parent, or simply share a descriptive family name, 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.
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.
Cartigny
A hard northern French bitter apple of the type used in small proportion for phenolic concentration, now uncommon and thinly documented.
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 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 keeved cider — A cider made naturally sweet by starving the yeast rather than by adding sugar. Keeving strips nutrients out of the juice before fermentation, so the ferment slows and stops with fruit sugar still in it, and nothing has been put back.
- 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.
- 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
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.
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.