Guillevic

How it is classified

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.

High, clean acid with a lifted floral and citrus aroma quite unlike the neutral sharps. Pale, almost white juice with no tannin to muddy it.

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.

• 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.
• Lemon — A sharp citrus impression built from high malic acid read alongside light esters and terpene traces.
• Apple blossom — A light, sweet floral note from terpene alcohols and 2-phenylethanol, distinct from the fruit character of the same tree.

Put Guillevic 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.

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.

In the orchard

Harvest window

Mid

Flowering

Pollination group 3

Vigour

Moderate

Cropping

Slightly biennial

Keeping

Poor — mill soon after picking

Picked when the ground colour has moved from green towards yellow; left too long, the acid drops away and the aroma goes with it.

Wants pressing promptly; it does not reward storage.

Disease and pest susceptibility

Juice and pressing

• High malic acid and a low pH, which makes it microbiologically the safest juice in the Breton repertoire
• Very pale must with essentially no phenolic colour
• Aromatic fraction that survives a cool ferment

How it is used

• Single-varietal Breton cider, bottled under the cultivar name and made in a pale, fresh, lightly sparkling style
• Acid correction in blends dominated by Douce Moën

On its own

About Guillevic

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.

Why it matters

• The French cider apple whose name is most familiar to consumers, because it is sold under it
• A demonstration that a sharp, tannin-free cider is a legitimate French style and not a failure to achieve a Norman one

Related cultivars

Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.

• Traditional blend partner

  Douce Moën

  The Breton base whose acid deficit Guillevic corrects; the two are the standard Breton pairing.

• Similar role

  Petit Jaune

  The older Breton sharp, without the aroma.

• Often confused with

  Judor

  Both are French sharps and they are not interchangeable: one is a Morbihan cultivar with a protected single-varietal tradition, the other a modern bred blending component.

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.

• Judeline

  A modern French bred cider cultivar released alongside Judor, sharp-leaning and scab-resistant, intended for the same low-input orchards.

• Judor

  A modern French bred sharp apple carrying scab resistance, released from the national breeding programme to give growers an acid cultivar they could crop without a heavy spray schedule.

• Petit Jaune

  A small yellow Breton sharp grown for one purpose: putting acid back into blends built on fruit that has almost none.

• Locard Vert

  A hard green Norman sharp that hangs very late and stores through the winter, one of a small family of Locards distinguished mainly by colour.

• Golden Russet

  The highest-gravity fruit in widespread North American cider use — a small bronze russet from New York whose juice regularly presses above 1.060 and which many revival makers treat as their benchmark cultivar.

• Kingston Black

  The most celebrated English single-varietal cider apple: a small dark-red bittersharp carrying acid and tannin in one fruit, and a tree difficult enough that its reputation has always outrun its plantings.

Styles it is characteristic of

• Cidre de Bretagne

  Protected Breton cider, built on a distinct western fruit inventory and generally drier, lighter and more acid-led than its Norman counterpart.

Where it grows

• Brittany

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.

• What temperature should cider ferment at — Most cider is fermented cool, commonly between about 12 and 18 °C. Cooler ferments keep more fruit aroma and run slower; above the low twenties the cider tends towards hot, solvent-like higher alcohols.
• How is sparkling cider made
• 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.
• How do you adjust the acidity of cider
• What makes a cider taste of apple blossom
• Why does apple juice go brown when pressed — Polyphenol oxidase in the fruit reacts phenolics with oxygen the moment cells are broken, turning the juice brown. In cider making this is sometimes prevented with sulphite and sometimes encouraged, because it also drops harsh tannin out of solution.

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.

• 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.

• Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement (INRAE)

  INRAE · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24

  French national agricultural research. Its Angers programme produced much of the published work on apple procyanidin chain length and on the relationship between polymer size, bitterness and astringency.