Fréquin Rouge cider apple

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.

Placed in the bitter family rather than the bittersweet one on polyphenol content; some Norman growers describe the milder strains as douce-amère, which is part of why the name covers more than one fruit.

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 Fruit grown in Somerset after the Herefordshire and Somerset introductions of the 1880s..

The two schemes cut the tannin axis at different points and were fitted to fruit in different climates, so “amère” and “bittersweet” here are not a contradiction — they are two systems answering slightly different questions about the same apple.

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.

Contribution to a blend, scored 1–5 as a band. The filled segment is the typical value; the paler segments are the range.
Axis	Typical	Range
Acid	Low
Tannin	Heavy
Sugar	High
Bitterness	Dominant
Astringency	Harsh
Aroma	Restrained
Body	Full

Based on: its recorded classification

The French bitter family placement, corroborated by the Long Ashton bittersweet classification of English-grown trees. No verified per-cultivar analysis sits behind the individual bands.

Hard and astringent to bite, with the drying grip arriving before any sweetness registers. In juice the bitterness is broad and slow rather than sharp, and it stays in the mouth after swallowing.

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 skin — The dry, faintly waxy and slightly bitter aroma of the fruit’s surface rather than its flesh, carried by cuticular waxes, hexyl esters and skin-concentrated phenolics.
Wet stone — A cool, damp, faintly mineral impression, in cider a product of low-level sulphur compounds and high acidity rather than of minerals.

Put Fréquin Rouge into a blend

Measured analysis

Each figure is shown with where and when it was taken. They are not averaged: the same cultivar grown in another climate genuinely gives different numbers, and collapsing them into one would be the most misleading thing this page could do.

Measured on the fruit

Measured on the fruit itself, before anything was done to it. These figures hold whatever was later made from the juice.

Reported analyses of Fréquin Rouge, by property and source — measured on the fruit
Property	Reading	Where	When	Source
Fruit diameter	59 mm	WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA	2002–2017Modern analysis	Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Juice yield	553 L/t	WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA	2002–2017Modern analysis	Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center

Measured on the juice

Measured on juice as pressed, before fermentation. This is where most cider analysis lives and what the classification schemes are defined on.

Reported analyses of Fréquin Rouge, by property and source — measured on the juice
Property	Reading	Where	When	Source
Brix	11.4 °Bx	WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA	2002–2017Modern analysis	Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
pH	4.17 pH	WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA	2002–2017Modern analysis	Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Specific gravity	1.047 SG	WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA	2002–2017Modern analysis	Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Total acid	0.260 % w/v	WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA	2002–2017Modern analysis	Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Total tannin	0.300 % w/v	WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA	2002–2017Modern analysis	Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center

How these were measured

Permanganate titration against indigo carmine, reported as tannic acid equivalent
Titration, reported as malic acid equivalent
Published as 2.31 inches; converted at 25.4 mm to the inch
Juice pressed from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Published as 251 mL/lb; converted at 2.204623 lb to the kilogram

Compare within a study to see where these figures sat among the other cultivars the same work analysed — which is a more robust statement than the figures themselves, because absolute values move between laboratories and the ordering inside one study mostly survives.

Watched in the orchard

What named research programmes recorded about this fruit at their own sites. Bloom, harvest and cropping belong to a place and a run of seasons rather than to a cultivar, so they are reported site by site rather than merged.

WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial

Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center, Mount Vernon, Skagit Valley, Washington · 2002–2017 · Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center

Maritime, with cool summers and mild wet winters — the closest North American analogue to the English West Country, and the reason the programme planted European cider fruit here rather than east of the Cascades.

Mean full bloom: 7 May
Harvest: 2 October
Bloom density: 4.1 of 5
Productivity: 3.1 of 5
Growth habit: Spreading
Bearing: Semi Spur
Alternate bearing: Semi alternate
Blind wood: 1.5 of 5
Rootstocks: MM.106

Filed here as bittersweet.

Tasted at this site

Color golden amber, moderately bitter. Viscous with some body, astringent with complex aromas. May be best as a blender to boost tannins and add complexity. Cidery, nutmeg, vanilla, slightly warms the back of the mouth, moderate bitter aftertaste lingers.

Recorded by the programme from professional cidermakers in the region. One panel, one place, one set of seasons — a description of these ciders rather than of the cultivar everywhere.

Juice characteristics measured on 250 mL of pressed juice; juice yield from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Bloom density, productivity and blind wood are the site’s own subjective 1–5 ratings. Figures are means across the seasons each cultivar was in the trial.

In the orchard

Harvest window: Late
Flowering: Pollination group 4
Vigour: Vigorous
Cropping: Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
Keeping: Good

Picked late and often left to sweat for a fortnight or more, which softens the flesh enough to mill without shattering the press cloth.

Slow into bearing on standard stocks, then strongly alternate unless thinned.

Holds in a heap for several weeks, which is how it is normally handled.

Late-flowering, which is part of its value in frost-prone Norman valley sites.

Disease and pest susceptibility

Recorded susceptibility. Pressure differs enormously by region and by season, so these are tendencies rather than predictions.
Issue	Susceptibility	Note
Scab	moderate	—
Canker	moderate	More troublesome on heavy, wet Norman clays than on the lighter slopes.

Juice and pressing

Low nitrogen, which is one reason it keeves readily
High procyanidin content with a long finish
Moderate sugar rather than high

How it is used

A tannin component in Pays d’Auge and Cotentin blends, rarely more than a modest fraction
Cider destined for distillation into Calvados, where the phenolic weight survives the still

On its own

Not suited to a single-varietal cider

On its own it is punishing — all grip and no lift. Where a single-varietal Fréquin is offered it is usually a keeved, arrested ferment with substantial residual sugar doing the balancing that another cultivar would otherwise do.

About Fréquin Rouge

Fréquin Rouge is the fruit an English reader should meet first when trying to understand why French bittersweets are not English bittersweets. It is small, hard enough to bruise a thumb, and so tannic that a mouthful of the fresh juice reads as almost entirely astringency. In a Norman blend it is used the way a cook uses a reduction: in small proportion, for concentration, and never as the base.

The confusion around the name is not a footnote. Fréquin in Norman usage denotes a type — a hard, bitter, late-keeping apple — and by the nineteenth century a dozen local selections were circulating under Fréquin names, of which Fréquin Rouge, Fréquin Blanc, Fréquin Audièvre and Fréquin Tardif are only the ones that reached print. Nursery stock sold as Fréquin Rouge in the 1880s was already heterogeneous, which is one reason English trial results from that era disagree about the fruit.

Its behaviour is inseparable from the method it was selected for. The juice is low in assimilable nitrogen, which is a liability in a fast inoculated ferment and an asset in keeving, where a slow, nitrogen-starved fermentation is precisely the point. Growers who have taken Fréquin Rouge to a warmer climate and fermented it dry with a cultured yeast generally report something coarse; the same fruit keeved and left to crawl through a Norman winter gives the depth the cultivar is planted for.

In the orchard it is a slow starter and a stubborn biennial, and it does not suit the intensive bush systems that have replaced standard trees across much of Normandy. Where it survives it is often in old high-stem orchards, which means its future is tied to the survival of a planting system rather than to any judgement about the fruit.

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

“Fréquin” is a Norman name for a class of hard bitter apples rather than a single raiser’s cultivar, and no origin record for Fréquin Rouge as such survives. Trees sold under the name in the nineteenth century were already several distinct things.

Other names this fruit is known by. Each is a name for the same cultivar, not a separate one — which is why none of them has a page of its own.
Name	Kind	Note
Frequin Rouge Petit	Regional name	Normandy. Used where a grower wants to separate the smaller-fruited strain from the larger one; the two are not reliably distinguished in nursery stock.
Frequin Audievre	Disputed identity	Normandy. Occasionally written as though it were the same fruit. It is treated as a distinct cultivar here and in French practice.

Why it matters

One of the fruits that carried the French bitter class into English orchards during the 1880s import wave
The clearest illustration of a Norman naming pattern where a family name has been treated as a cultivar name

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.
Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité (INAO)
INAO · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24
The Cidre Pays d’Auge cahier des charges was read in full on 2026-08-24, in the version homologated by arrêté of 17 January 2026 and published in the Journal officiel on 21 January. That qualification is not decoration. A revision adopted by the Comité national on 10 September 2025 is currently under the procédure nationale d’opposition, is clearly marked as not prejudging the final text, and specifies carbonation differently from the text in force — as grams of CO2 per litre rather than as a minimum pressure in bar. A summary citing the draft would have put a figure on the page that no producer is held to. CiderHQ records the operative text and says which one it is.
National Fruit Collection
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.