Cider apple
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.
Also written Moulin a Vent, Moulin-à-Vent.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Bittersweet base, Tannin and structure
- Origin
- Normandy
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
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.
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 English-grown fruit analysed at Long Ashton..
Recorded as a bittersweet in England; the French family placement is the same in substance, and the schemes agree on this fruit as they do on Michelin.
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 | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Full |
Dual French and Long Ashton bittersweet placement.
Firmly bitter with a dry finish and low acid; harder-edged than Michelin and softer than the Fréquins.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Moulin à Vent, 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 Moulin à Vent. 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 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Moderate
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Canker | moderate | — |
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Firm tannin
- Low acid
- Moderate sugar
How it is used
- Blending fruit in Normandy
- A bittersweet in English orchards planted from French stock
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Occasionally attempted in England; the low acid limits how far it gets alone.
About Moulin à Vent
Moulin à Vent is part of the same story as Bramtot: a Norman bittersweet that crossed to England during the deliberate importation of French cider fruit in the 1880s, was analysed at Long Ashton, and was planted in English orchards for several decades before the economics of intensive growing narrowed the field.
Its juice is a straightforward bittersweet with a firmer, drier grip than Michelin and less concentration than the Fréquins. In a French blend it is a structural component; in the English orchards where it was planted it was treated as a base fruit, fermented dry, and expected to carry a cider — which is a different job from the one it was selected for, and one it does adequately rather than well.
That difference is the general point about the imports. English growers took French cultivars and used them in the English way: no keeving, full attenuation, blends built to be dry. Fruit selected under an assumption of arrested, low-nitrogen fermentation does not automatically excel under those conditions, and the mixed English verdict on the 1880s imports is partly a verdict on a method mismatch rather than on the fruit.
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
Named for a landmark, which locates the tree without dating 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Can you make cider from shop bought apple juice — Yes, provided the juice contains no preservative — check for potassium sorbate or benzoate on the label. Pasteurised juice ferments perfectly well once yeast is added, because pasteurisation removes the organisms but not the sugar.
- How do you blend cider
- What is a michelin apple
- 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 maceration in cider making — Maceration is letting milled pomace stand before pressing, so that enzymes soften the tissue and phenolics and aroma move from the skins into the juice. It raises both colour and tannin, and raises the risk of oxidation with them.
- 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.
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.
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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.