Jaune de Vitré

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.

Extremely sharp, with a useful gravity and moderate phenolics behind the acid.

Aroma

No aroma descriptors are recorded for Jaune de Vitré, 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.

Put Jaune de Vitré 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

Not recorded

Vigour

Vigorous

Cropping

Slightly biennial

Keeping

Good

Not recorded in the source that measures it.

Very high-acid fruit generally keeps well; acid falls slowly in store and the fruit resists rot.

Not recorded in any source CiderHQ has verified.

Juice and pressing

• 15.9 g/L malic acid — more than three times most French bittersweets
• pH 3.3, comfortably in the range where sulphur dioxide works
• 788 mg/L total polyphenols
• High gravity at 1.064

How it is used

• Blended in small proportion to raise acid and drop pH in a bittersweet must.
• Breton cider tradition, which uses more sharp fruit than Normandy does.

On its own

About Jaune de Vitré

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 sharpest fruit in the French institute’s 2018 dataset by a wide margin, and one of only two varieties in it whose classification CiderHQ is willing to assert from the figures.

Related cultivars

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

• Similar role

  Judor

  The other very sharp variety in the same study, at 13.2 g/L.

• Similar role

  Guillevic

  A Breton sharp with a comparable role and less extreme acid.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Hewe’s Crab

  The historic cider crab of Virginia — small, hard, very high in acid and unusually tannic for an American apple, and probably a hybrid between a cultivated apple and a native crab.

Where it grows

• Brittany
• Normandy

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 i balance acid and tannin in a blend — Acid and tannin do different jobs and cannot substitute for each other: acid gives freshness and microbiological safety, tannin gives structure and length. A blend short of acid tastes flabby however tannic it is.
• How do you blend cider
• Why is sulphite added to cider — Sulphur dioxide suppresses spoilage bacteria and wild yeast before fermentation and protects the finished cider from oxidation. How much of it is active depends strongly on pH, which is why low-acid juice is harder to protect.
• 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 cidre de bretagne igp actually guarantee — That the apples were grown and the cider made in the area, and that the fruit met a measured tannin floor. It permits concentrate to 40 per cent of the must, added water and injected gas, all of which the French appellations of origin forbid.
• 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.

• Caractérisation de jus de pomme à cidre et analyse comparative avec des jus de pomme commerciaux

  Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles (IFPC) · research institute · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 2018 harvest

  A technical-day presentation by the French cider institute, retrieved and read in full on 2026-08-25. Twelve French cider varieties characterised for malic acid, total acidity, density, pH and total polyphenols, with sensory profiling on the same juices. The first French institutional juice figures CiderHQ has been able to open, and important out of proportion to their number because the site holds many French cultivars and previously held almost no French measurements. The total acidity column is not published by CiderHQ: the slide does not state its unit and the ratio to the malic figure matches no convention the site can identify.

• 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.