Cider apple
Judeline
A modern French bred cider cultivar released alongside Judor, sharp-leaning and scab-resistant, intended for the same low-input orchards.
- Classification
- Sharp — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Tannin and structure
- Origin
- France, from the national fruit breeding programme
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
French cider apple families
Sharp · Acidulée
High acid with low tannin.
Basis: Tannin below 2 g/L and acidity 3 to 4.5 g/L as H₂SO₄.
Sharp family, though it carries more tannin than Judor and some descriptions place it closer to the boundary with the bittersweet family.
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 | High | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
French sharp family placement, with wider bands than Judor because its position relative to the bittersweet boundary is described inconsistently.
Sharp with a faint drying edge that Judor lacks, which makes it slightly more useful in a blend and slightly harder to categorise.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Judeline, 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 Judeline. 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
- Mid
- Flowering
- Pollination group 3
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | low | Bred for resistance; the same caveat about the durability of single-gene resistance applies as for Judor. |
Juice and pressing
- High acid with a trace of tannin
- Consistent analysis
- Suited to low-input production
How it is used
- Acid component in modern French blends
- Organic orchard plantings
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
A blending cultivar by design and by behaviour.
About Judeline
Judeline is the second of the modern French bred sharps that a reader is likely to meet, and it differs from Judor chiefly in carrying a small amount of tannin. That sounds trivial and is not: a sharp with a trace of phenolic grip is more useful in a blend than a purely acid one, because it lifts without thinning the middle of the palate.
It also sits awkwardly on the French classification. Descriptions place it in the acidulée family, but its tannin is high enough that some accounts push it towards the bittersweet boundary — a reminder that the French scheme, like the English one, draws lines through a continuous distribution and that fruit near a line will be reported inconsistently in good faith.
Like Judor, it exists because Atlantic France cannot grow apples without confronting scab, and because the traditional cultivars that dominate the region are mostly susceptible. Whether bred cultivars of this generation come to make up a large share of French cider fruit is an open question that depends more on how contracts and appellation rules develop than on the fruit itself.
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.
Parentage · not established
A bred selection with scab resistance as a target. The specific cross is not stated here because CiderHQ has not verified it.
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.
Guillevic
A pale green Breton sharp with an unusually distinct aroma, and the only French cider apple with a substantial single-varietal tradition attached to a protected quality mark.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
- How do you adjust the acidity of cider
- 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
- What is breton 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.
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.