Cider apple
Lavignée
A French bittersweet of the Normandy introductions, measured by Long Ashton at moderate tannin and low acid and grown in English orchards under a French name.
Also written Lavignee, Lavigné.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — Long Ashton classification
- Harvest
- Early (September)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bittersweet base, Early season
- Origin
- Normandy, France
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
How it is classified
Long Ashton classification
Bittersweet
Low acid, high tannin. The class that has no real equivalent in dessert fruit and that defines West Country cider.
Basis: Below about 0.45% w/v acid and above about 0.2% w/v tannin.
Long Ashton recorded 0.21% acid and 0.27% tannin — a clear bittersweet by both thresholds.
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 | Low | |
| Tannin | Firm | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Marked | |
| Astringency | Drying | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Full |
The Long Ashton composite: 0.21% acid, 0.27% tannin.
A soft, low-acid bittersweet juice with useful tannin and no great aroma.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Lavignée, 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
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.
Total acid0.210 % w/v
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England, 1905–1975 · Titration with alkali, reported as malic acid. Composite figure across many seasons; the source states neither the sample count nor the year of any individual analysis. · Andrew Lea
A composite of Long Ashton analyses reaching CiderHQ through three hands: the station’s own work, a printed compilation (Bulmer’s Pomona, 1987, and Beech and Carr, 1977), and a transcription of that compilation. CiderHQ has seen only the transcription.
How much acid the juice contains, conventionally reported as malic acid. Measured in percent weight per volume.
Total tannin0.270 % w/v
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England, 1905–1975 · Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported as tannic acid equivalent. Composite figure across many seasons; the source states neither the sample count nor the year of any individual analysis. · Andrew Lea
A composite of Long Ashton analyses reaching CiderHQ through three hands: the station’s own work, a printed compilation (Bulmer’s Pomona, 1987, and Beech and Carr, 1977), and a transcription of that compilation. CiderHQ has seen only the transcription. A permanganate figure. It is not comparable with a Folin–Ciocalteu total-phenolics figure for the same fruit, and the two can differ by a factor of two.
The phenolic fraction responsible for bitterness and astringency. Measured in percent weight per volume.
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.
Long Ashton composite cider apple analyses
Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, North Somerset, England · 1905–1975 · Andrew Lea
Maritime and mild, with wet autumns and few hard frosts — the climate the English cider cultivars were selected in, and the reason their acid and tannin figures here are the ones the rest of the world has spent a century comparing its own fruit against.
- Held as
- Listed as “Lavignee”, early/mid season
Filed here as bittersweet.
Freshly expressed juice, not finished cider. Acid by straight titration against alkali, reported as malic acid; tannin by Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported as tannic acid equivalent. Composite figures across seventy years of analyses: the source gives neither a sample count nor the year of any individual reading.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Early
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Moderate
Early to mid in the Long Ashton table, with Bulmer’s Norman, Perthyre and Somerset Redstreak.
Not recorded in any source CiderHQ has verified.
Juice and pressing
- Tannin of 0.27% w/v
- Low acid at 0.21% w/v
- An unexceptional bittersweet profile of the kind the Normandy imports were selected for
How it is used
- Blended as an early bittersweet.
- One of the French cultivars planted in English orchards for reliable tannin.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Low acid and moderate tannin without notable aroma. Nothing in the record suggests it has been made alone.
About Lavignée
Lavignée is one of the French cider apples that ended up in English orchards. Long Ashton’s composite table carries eight cultivars with French names — Nehou, Médaille d’Or, Reine des Pommes, Vilberie, Cimetière, Binet Rouge, Reine des Hâtives and this one — which is a striking proportion of a forty-two-cultivar table describing English cider fruit, and a measure of how seriously the English industry went looking abroad for tannin.
Its own figures are unremarkable and that is why it was wanted: 0.21 per cent acid and 0.27 per cent tannin is a solid bittersweet, close to Bulmer’s Norman at 0.24 and 0.27, and the point of importing such fruit was not to find something extraordinary but to find something dependable that ripened early. English orchards had plenty of sharp fruit and a shortage of reliable early tannin.
Very little else is recorded. The spelling drifts — Lavignee, Lavigné, Lavignée — in the way French names generally do when they pass through English nursery lists, and no flowering, cropping or modern analytical record for it has reached CiderHQ.
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 French cider apple among the group imported into English orcharding in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The spelling varies between sources, which is common in French names transplanted into English nursery lists.
Why it matters
- One of eight cultivars in the Long Ashton composite table carrying a French name, which is a measure of how far the English cider industry went looking for tannin.
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.
Ellis Bitter
An early Devon bittersweet, large and conical and deep red, giving good early-season tannin from a tree that crops heavily and unevenly.
Ashton Bitter
A twentieth-century bittersweet raised at Long Ashton, combining early ripening with substantial tannin and a compact, precocious tree.
Major
An early, heavily bittersweet Somerset apple with high tannin and very low acid, valued for putting structure into the first pressings of the season.
Dabinett
The most widely planted English cider apple: a small, late-ripening bittersweet whose soft, full tannin ferments into a cider that needs almost nothing added to it.
Michelin
A Norman bittersweet raised near Yvetot in the 1870s that became, in England rather than in France, one of the most widely planted cider apples in the world.
Somerset Redstreak
A mild bittersweet planted at very large scale in the late twentieth century for its heavy, regular cropping on bush trees, and a fruit whose commercial importance exceeds its character.
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.
- What is normandy cider
- What is tannin balancing
- What is herefordshire cider
- What is bulmers norman
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.
Cider Apple Compositional Data
Andrew Lea · reference work · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 1905–2014
Registered separately from the same author’s Science of Cidermaking, and at a lower tier, because its evidential character is different. The Science of Cidermaking is a chemist writing about work he did; this page is that chemist transcribing other people’s tables, and CiderHQ can vouch for the transcription without vouching for what lies behind it. It carries three tables: the Long Ashton composite for forty-two cultivars, credited to Bulmer’s Pomona (1987) and Beech and Carr (1977); a late-1970s New York analysis credited to unpublished work printed in a 1989 food-technology chapter; and a 2014 Virginia polyphenol study. Every figure CiderHQ takes from it records that chain.
Long Ashton Research Station cider fruit analyses
National Fruit and Cider Institute / University of Bristol · research institute · registered as competent for this subject · covers 1903–2003
The foundational body of cider-fruit science in English. Long Ashton produced the acid-and-tannin classification that divides cider apples into sweet, sharp, bittersweet and bittersharp, and analysed hundreds of cultivars grown at its Somerset site. Its figures are historic measurements of specific fruit at a specific place, not universal constants — a distinction CiderHQ preserves in every measurement record that cites it.
Expert reference Evidence standard for this record. What that means.