Cider apple
Gueule de Mouton
An old Walloon apple of the Pays de Herve, dual-purpose and long-keeping, and one of the cultivars Belgium’s small cider revival has worked with.
Also written Cwastresse Double, Gueule de Mouton de Herve.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bulk juice, Acid lift
- Origin
- Wallonia, most closely associated with the Pays de Herve
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Gueule de Mouton. 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 | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
Description in Belgian heritage-orchard work as a dual-purpose keeping apple. No registered classification scheme covers Belgian fruit, and the record is thin.
Flattened, firm and moderately sharp, softening in store; the descriptive record does not support more precision than that.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Gueule de Mouton, 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 Gueule de Mouton. 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
- Moderate acid
- Little tannin
- Reliable in a mixed pressing
How it is used
- Eating, cooking and storage in Walloon farm households
- Belgian farm cider and the small modern Belgian cider revival
- A tree of the high-stem grazed orchards of the Pays de Herve
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
No tradition, and the record is too thin to say whether one would work.
About Gueule de Mouton
Belgium sits between two cider traditions and belongs fully to neither. The Pays de Herve, east of Liège, is high-stem grazed orchard country of exactly the kind found in Normandy and the Rhineland, and it produced cider, sirop de Liège and famously a washed-rind cheese from the same landscape. Gueule de Mouton is one of its cultivars.
The name is a Walloon joke — sheep’s mouth — of the same order as the Norman peau de chien and the German Schafsnase. Descriptive, unflattering names for orchard fruit are close to universal across the northern European cider belt, and they are a reliable sign of a cultivar named by the people who handled it rather than by anyone selling it.
The Belgian record is thin, and this entry reflects that. What can be said is that the cultivar is a recognised Walloon heritage apple, that it is dual-purpose and keeps well, and that Belgian conservation orchards hold it. There is no analysis, no classification scheme fitted to Belgian fruit, and no substantial body of cider description to draw on.
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
A Walloon heritage cultivar with no documented raising. The Pays de Herve association is traditional.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Cwastresse Double | Regional name | Wallonia. The Walloon name, and the one used in Belgian conservation work. *Cwastresse* is a Walloon term for a flattened apple. |
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.
Blanquina
A pale-skinned Asturian cultivar of high reputation, and — like Raxao, with which it is usually named — an acid-block fruit rather than a semi-acid one.
Bramley’s Seedling
England’s dominant cooking apple, a triploid of very high acid and negligible tannin, and by volume one of the most important fruits in modern British cider.
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.
Granny Smith
An Australian chance seedling of the 1860s that became one of the most planted apples on earth, and — because it is reliably sharp when almost nothing else commercial is — a genuine workhorse of commercial 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.
Regona
The most acid cultivar the Asturian designation characterises, at 7,1 g/L, and one of the most planted: a late, hard, acid-bitter fruit that supplies the backbone of *sidra natural*.
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
- Is boskoop good for cider — It is one of the apples most often recommended for German and Dutch cider, on high acid rather than on tannin. Belle de Boskoop is a large, russeted, long-keeping culinary apple, and its role in a blend is the same as any sharp: acid and a lower pH.
- What does cidre fermier mean
- Is cider made in belgium — Belgium has a very large orchard economy in the Haspengouw belt of Flanders, and a small cider sector within it. Most Belgian fruit goes to the fresh and processing markets rather than to fermentation.
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.
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.
European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.