Judor

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.

Clean, high acid with a citrus edge and essentially no tannin. It tastes like what it was bred to be.

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.

Put Judor 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

Moderate

Regular cropping was a selection criterion, and it shows.

Disease and pest susceptibility

Juice and pressing

• High malic acid
• Very low tannin
• Reliable analysis year on year — a consequence of breeding for uniformity

How it is used

• Acid correction in modern Norman and Breton blends
• Organic and low-input orchards, where its scab resistance is the whole reason for planting it

On its own

About Judor

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

• Part of the first generation of purpose-bred French cider cultivars, and evidence that the French orchard is an actively managed population rather than a museum

Related cultivars

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

• Similar role

  Judeline

  Released from the same programme with the same objective; the two are routinely discussed as a pair.

• Similar role

  Petit Jaune

  The traditional Breton sharp that modern bred cultivars were intended to replace.

• Often confused with

  Guillevic

  Both are French sharps used for acid correction; Guillevic is a traditional Breton cultivar with a protected reputation and Judor is a modern bred one, and conflating them in a blend description misstates both.

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.

• Judeline

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

• 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.

• 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.

Where it grows

• Normandy
• 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.

• How do you blend cider
• 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.
• 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
• Why does cider smell of lemon
• 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.

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.