Cider apple
Médaille d’Or
A small, russeted Norman bittersweet with exceptionally high tannin and sugar, famous in England out of all proportion to how much of it anyone has ever managed to grow.
Also written Medaille d’Or, Medaille d Or, Gold Medal.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Very late (November onwards)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure, Vintage quality, Late season
- Origin
- Bréauté, Seine-Maritime, Normandy
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 5
- Vigour
- Low — a small, manageable tree
- Biennial bearing
- Severely biennial — a substantial crop only every other year
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
Classified under more than one system. The systems use different thresholds and were built for different fruit, so the answers can legitimately differ — that is a fact about the schemes, not a contradiction.
French cider apple families
Bittersweet · Douce-amère
Low acid with substantial tannin.
Basis: Tannin 2 to 3 g/L and acidity below 3 g/L as H₂SO₄.
Placed in the bittersweet family in France, though its polyphenol content is high enough that the amère boundary is arguable.
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.
Assessed in Fruit grown in Somerset and analysed at Long Ashton, where it was recorded as one of the most tannic cultivars in the collection..
The English record treats it as an extreme of the bittersweet class; the French one treats it as an ordinary member of a family that has a more extreme class above it. Both statements are about the same juice, and the difference is entirely in where the schemes put their boundaries.
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 | Heavy | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | Dominant | |
| Astringency | Harsh | |
| Aroma | Pronounced | |
| Body | Full |
Dual classification, with English analysis placing it at the top of the tannin range and French practice keeping it inside the bittersweet family.
Intensely astringent with a bitterness that arrives late and stays, carried on sugar high enough to be tasted through it. Small fruit with a dense, dry, russeted skin.
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.
- Apple skin — The dry, faintly waxy and slightly bitter aroma of the fruit’s surface rather than its flesh, carried by cuticular waxes, hexyl esters and skin-concentrated phenolics.
- Ripe apple — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
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.
Measured on the fruit
Measured on the fruit itself, before anything was done to it. These figures hold whatever was later made from the juice.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fruit diameter2 readings, spanning 55–56 mm | 55 mm | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 56 mm (52–59) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| Fruit firmness | 50.9 N (42.0–59.8) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Fruit weight | 72 g (62–83) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Juice yield | 547 L/t | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Starch pattern index | 7.5 SPI (6.5–8.5) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
Measured on the juice
Measured on juice as pressed, before fermentation. This is where most cider analysis lives and what the classification schemes are defined on.
| Property | Reading | Where | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brix2 readings, spanning 14.9–15.5 °Bx | 14.9 °Bx | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 15.5 °Bx (14.3–16.8) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| pH2 readings, spanning 4.09–4.33 pH | 4.09 pH | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 4.33 pH (4.30–4.36) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| Total acid2 readings, spanning 0.270–0.320 % w/v | 0.320 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 0.270 % w/v | Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England | 1905–1975Historic analysis | Andrew Lea | |
| Total tannin2 readings, spanning 0.640–0.820 % w/v | 0.820 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 0.640 % w/v | Long Ashton Research Station, near Bristol, Somerset, England | 1905–1975Historic analysis | Andrew Lea | |
| Fructose | 60.4 g/L (59.4–61.4) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Glucose | 19.5 g/L (18.3–20.7) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Sorbitol | 14.3 g/L (8.1–20.5) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Specific gravity | 1.059 SG | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Sucrose | 40.8 g/L (30.6–51.0) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Titratable acidity | 2.4 g/L (2.2–2.5) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Total phenolics | 4290.0 mg/L (4230.0–4350.0) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
5 properties here have been measured more than once. The readings are shown as they were taken and are deliberately not averaged — climate, season, ripeness at picking, the age of the tree and the analytical method all move these numbers, and a single figure would hide every one of them. Where a spread is given below a property, it is the distance between separate studies, not the variation within any one of them.
How these were measured
- Permanganate titration against indigo carmine, reported as tannic acid equivalent
- Titration, reported as malic acid equivalent
- Published as 2.15 inches; converted at 25.4 mm to the inch
- Juice pressed from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Published as 248 mL/lb; converted at 2.204623 lb to the kilogram
- Mean of the fruit sampled per accession; where a bracket is shown it is one standard deviation either side of the mean, not the observed range. Published to two decimal places and shown at the precision CiderHQ displays for the unit.
- Mean of the fruit sampled per accession; where a bracket is shown it is one standard deviation either side of the mean, not the observed range.
- Cornell generic starch–iodine chart, 1–8, where 1 is no hydrolysis and 8 is complete. Mean of replicate fruit; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of it.
- Penetrometer, mean of replicate fruit; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Refractometer on pressed juice. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Titration to pH 8.2 with sodium hydroxide, reported as malic acid equivalents. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Meter on pressed juice before fermentation. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- Löwenthal permanganate titration, reported by the source as grams per litre of tannic acid equivalent and stored here as milligrams per litre by exact conversion so that it sits in one column with the Folin–Ciocalteu figures the site also holds. The two methods do not measure the same thing and are not interchangeable.
- Enzymatic assay (Megazyme). Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- D-sorbitol/xylitol assay kit (Megazyme), sorbitol dehydrogenase method. Mean of replicates; a bracket, where shown, is one standard deviation either side of the mean.
- 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.
- 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.
- A chart position, not a quantity. Almost every accession here scored at or near 8, which says the fruit was picked at or past full starch conversion rather than that the cultivars are alike.
- One harvest at one site. Soluble solids move several degrees between seasons and with crop load.
- A permanganate figure and a Folin–Ciocalteu figure for the same juice can differ by a factor of two. Compare this reading with other permanganate readings, not with a Folin one.
- 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 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.
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.
WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial
Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center, Mount Vernon, Skagit Valley, Washington · 2002–2017 · Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center
Maritime, with cool summers and mild wet winters — the closest North American analogue to the English West Country, and the reason the programme planted European cider fruit here rather than east of the Cascades.
- Mean full bloom
- 29 May
- Harvest
- 15 October
- Bloom density
- 3.2 of 5
- Productivity
- 3 of 5
- Growth habit
- Semi Upright
- Bearing
- Semi Spur
- Alternate bearing
- Yes
- Blind wood
- 1 of 5
- Rootstocks
- MM.106, M26
Filed here as bittersweet.
Juice characteristics measured on 250 mL of pressed juice; juice yield from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Bloom density, productivity and blind wood are the site’s own subjective 1–5 ratings. Figures are means across the seasons each cultivar was in the trial.
USDA-PGRU Malus germplasm characterisation
USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, in the Finger Lakes region of western New York State · 2017 · Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit
Humid continental, with cold winters and warm summers moderated by the Finger Lakes — a sharper seasonal swing than any of the European cider regions whose fruit the collection holds, and warm enough in late summer to bring acid down faster than a maritime autumn does.
- Held as
- PI 594108, held as “Medaille d’Or”
One harvest season. Fruit assessed for weight, diameter, starch pattern index on the Cornell 1–8 chart and flesh firmness by penetrometer; juice pressed and measured for soluble solids by refractometer, titratable acidity by titration to pH 8.2 as malic acid, pH by meter, total phenolics by Löwenthal permanganate titration as tannic acid equivalent, and glucose, fructose, sucrose and sorbitol by enzymatic assay.
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 “Medaille d’Or”, late season
Filed here as bittersweet.
Marked in the source as one of the cultivars “generally regarded as having that elusive and hard-to-define character of vintage quality”. The compiler marks fourteen of the forty-two that way, and does not say who regards them so or on what evidence.
Recorded by the programme from professional cidermakers in the region. One panel, one place, one set of seasons — a description of these ciders rather than of the cultivar everywhere.
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
- Very late
- Flowering
- Pollination group 5
- Vigour
- Low — a small, manageable tree
- Cropping
- Severely biennial — a substantial crop only every other year
- Keeping
- Good
Among the last Norman cultivars, picked in November, and it needs the full hang to reach the sugar it is capable of.
Light-cropping and strongly alternate; the yield problem is the reason it never became a commercial cultivar despite its reputation.
Very late-flowering, which protects it from frost and complicates finding a pollination partner.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Canker | high | Badly affected in England, particularly on heavy ground, and a persistent problem in France too. |
| Scab | high | — |
Juice and pressing
- Among the highest tannin contents recorded in a cider apple
- High sugar, which is unusual in a fruit this tannic and is the basis of its reputation
- Low nitrogen; it keeves readily
- Very low juice yield per tonne, because the fruit is small and dry
How it is used
- A quality tannin component in Norman blends, used in small proportion
- A prized and frustrating cultivar in English vintage-quality orchards
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Its combination of very high tannin and high sugar makes a single-varietal cider conceivable, and it has been made. The result is a heavy, astringent drink that needs years, and the volumes involved are tiny because the tree crops so poorly.
About Médaille d’Or
Médaille d’Or has a place in English cider writing that its actual presence in orchards does not justify. It was analysed at Long Ashton and found to be extraordinarily tannic — the reference point against which other bittersweets were described — and that single fact has kept it in print for a century. What tends to be mentioned more briefly is that it is a poor cropper, a weak tree, and badly susceptible to both canker and scab.
The juice is genuinely remarkable. Very high tannin combined with high sugar is a rare pairing: most extremely tannic apples are also low in sugar, which leaves their bitterness bare. Médaille d’Or has the sugar to carry its phenolics, which is why it can contribute quality rather than merely grip, and why a small addition to a blend does more than the volume suggests.
Its French and English classifications together make the point this file exists to make. In France it is a douce-amère, an ordinary member of the bittersweet family, because France reserves a further class for the most tannic fruit. In England it is a bittersweet at the extreme of its class, because England has no class above it. The apple did not change; the ruler did.
Practically it is a cultivar for collections, for enthusiasts, and for small blocks in blends where a producer wants a distinctive tannin signature and can afford the yield. The small, dry fruit gives poor juice yield per tonne on top of a light crop, so the cost per litre is high before anything else is considered. It survives because people find it interesting, which is a perfectly good reason but not the same as an agronomic one.
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
Attributed to a raiser in the Pays de Caux around the 1860s and introduced to England in the following decades. The attribution is repeated consistently but rests on nineteenth-century nursery literature rather than on a documentary record.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Gold Medal | Trade name | England. An English translation used in nineteenth-century catalogues. It is the same fruit. |
Why it matters
- Frequently cited as the most tannic cultivar in the Long Ashton collection, which is why it appears in English cider writing far more often than it appears in orchards
- A clear case where a cultivar’s reputation and its agronomy point in opposite directions
Related cultivars
Recorded relationships, including the ones this fruit is routinely confused with.
Often confused with
Michelin
Imported together and named together in old planting records; the fruit are entirely unlike, but the labels have been swapped often enough to matter.
Similar role
Fréquin Rouge
The other high-tannin Norman cultivar, better in the orchard and less sweet in the press.
Traditional blend partner
Bramtot
Part of the same import wave and planted in the same English trial blocks.
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.
Nehou
A Norman bittersweet long grown in English orchards, giving high tannin from a small, late, hard fruit and cropping better than most of its class.
Bramtot
A Norman bittersweet raised in the Pays de Caux and taken to England in the 1880s, where it was analysed at Long Ashton and grown as a full bittersweet for most of a century.
Moulin à Vent
A Norman bittersweet named for a windmill, brought to England with the 1880s imports and grown there long enough to acquire an English reputation of its own.
Reine des Pommes
A dark red Norman bittersweet with a grand name and a solid reputation, imported into England alongside Michelin and Médaille d’Or and analysed there as a bittersweet of some quality.
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.
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.
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 keeving — Keeving is a technique for starving a ferment of nitrogen so that it stops before all the sugar is gone, leaving a naturally sweet cider. Pectin is made to gel and float as a brown cap, carrying nutrients and yeast out of the juice with it.
- What is a michelin apple
- Where does a ripe apple aroma in cider come from — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
- What is keeved cider — A cider made naturally sweet by starving the yeast rather than by adding sugar. Keeving strips nutrients out of the juice before fermentation, so the ferment slows and stops with fruit sugar still in it, and nothing has been put back.
- 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.
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.
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.
A Somerset Pomona: The Cider Apples of Somerset
Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001. ISBN 9781874336877 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001, ISBN 9781874336877. The author was Long Ashton’s cider pomologist, which is why this work is registered for Somerset cultivar identity at all — it is the nearest thing to a successor to the station’s own descriptions. No copy was opened. Not digitised in any open collection.
University of Reading / Defra, Brogdale · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The UK national reference collection for apple and pear cultivars. The authority CiderHQ uses for whether two names are the same fruit, which is the central duplicate-resolution problem in cider data.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.