Cider apple
Muscadet de Dieppe
An aromatic Norman sweet apple from the Dieppe country, grown for the musky perfume it lends a blend rather than for acid, tannin or sugar.
Also written Muscadet, Muscadet Dieppois.
- Classification
- Sweet — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Early (September)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Aroma, Early season
- Origin
- Pays de Caux, near Dieppe, Seine-Maritime
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 2
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
French cider apple families
Sweet · Douce
Low acid, low tannin. Sugar and body.
Basis: Tannin below 2 g/L and acidity below 3 g/L as H₂SO₄.
Classified as sweet on acid and polyphenol content, which captures almost nothing of what the fruit is actually planted for.
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 | Light | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | None | |
| Aroma | Dominant | |
| Body | Medium |
French sweet family placement, with the aroma band raised well above the family default because aromatic character is the cultivar’s entire reason for existing.
Markedly musky and floral, closer to a muscat grape than to most apples. Low in everything the classification measures and high in the thing it does not.
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.
- Ripe apple — Full orchard-apple aroma from the acetate esters an apple accumulates through ripening and carries into the finished drink.
- Apple blossom — A light, sweet floral note from terpene alcohols and 2-phenylethanol, distinct from the fruit character of the same tree.
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 60–67 mm | 67 mm | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 60 mm (51–68) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| Fruit firmness | 46.2 N (35.7–56.8) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Fruit weight | 84 g (51–116) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Juice yield | 467 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 | 7.1 SPI (6.3–7.9) | 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 13.6–14.2 °Bx | 14.2 °Bx | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 13.6 °Bx (12.6–14.6) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| pH2 readings, spanning 4.12–4.81 pH | 4.12 pH | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| 4.81 pH (4.75–4.87) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit | |
| Fructose | 67.9 g/L (45.8–90.0) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Glucose | 19.8 g/L (13.7–25.9) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Sorbitol | 10.0 g/L (5.3–14.7) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Specific gravity | 1.057 SG | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Sucrose | 43.4 g/L (32.2–54.6) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Titratable acidity | 1.6 g/L | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Total acid | 0.260 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
| Total phenolics | 1900.0 mg/L (1650.0–2150.0) | USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit, Geneva, New York, USA | 2017Modern analysis | Cornell University / USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit |
| Total tannin | 0.210 % w/v | WSU Mount Vernon NWREC, Skagit Valley, Washington, USA | 2002–2017Modern analysis | Washington State University Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center |
3 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 2.63 inches; converted at 25.4 mm to the inch
- Juice pressed from 25 fruit, 2015–2017 only. Published as 212 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.
- 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.
- The published standard deviation on this reading equals or exceeds the mean, so the interval it describes runs below zero. It is not reproduced; the mean is.
- 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.
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
- 9 May
- Harvest
- 13 September
- Bloom density
- 3.1 of 5
- Productivity
- 2.6 of 5
- Growth habit
- Spreading
- Bearing
- Tip Bearing
- Alternate bearing
- Semi alternate
- Blind wood
- 2.5 of 5
- Rootstocks
- M9, M27
Filed here as bittersweet.
Color dark amber, mildly bitter. Good body and balance. Single-varietal cider, even when fermented to dryness still gives a slightly sweet taste, mix of fruit and grass flavors.
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.
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 589493, held as “Muscadet de Dieppe”
- Published standard deviation on titratable acidity, published as mean 1.6 g/L, standard deviation 4.1 g/L. The deviation equals or exceeds the mean, so the interval it describes runs below zero. Something in the replicates for this accession went wrong, and CiderHQ publishes the mean without pretending to know the spread.
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.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Early
- Flowering
- Pollination group 2
- Vigour
- Moderate
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
Early to mid, and the aroma is at its strongest for a short window; over-ripe fruit smells of little.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- High free and bound terpene content, in the sense that the aroma survives fermentation
- Low acid, low tannin
- Pressed fresh; nothing is gained by storing it
How it is used
- An aromatic addition to Norman blends, usually a small fraction
- Fresh juice, where the perfume is at its most obvious
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
A single-varietal Muscadet de Dieppe is aromatically striking and structurally empty. Where it is made, it is normally a low-alcohol, lightly sparkling, sweet cider where the aroma is the point and nothing is asked of the structure.
About Muscadet de Dieppe
Muscadet de Dieppe is filed in the French scheme as a douce — low acid, low tannin — and that classification is accurate and almost useless. Nobody plants this fruit for sugar. It is planted because it smells of muscat, and because that perfume comes through fermentation into the finished cider in a way that most apple aroma does not.
This is a specific limitation of acid-and-tannin classification generally, and it applies as much to the Long Ashton scheme as to the French one. Both systems were built to predict how a blend would behave structurally, and both are silent on aroma, nitrogen, fermentation behaviour and the volatile chemistry that a drinker actually notices first. A cultivar like this one shows the gap plainly.
The name is a problem. Muscadet is applied across northern France to any apple with a musky note, and there are several; it is also, confusingly, a Loire wine and a grape. A tree offered as “Muscadet” without the Dieppe qualifier could be almost anything aromatic, and CiderHQ records the bare form as a regional name rather than a synonym for that reason.
It is early, it keeps badly, and its aroma has a narrow window. Practically, that ties it to fresh pressing and to producers who can put it straight into a blend, which is a constraint that has kept it a minor cultivar despite the genuine interest of its juice.
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.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Muscadet | Regional name | Seine-Maritime. The bare form is used locally and is a poor identifier: several unrelated aromatic apples across northern France are called *muscadet*, and the name is also a wine. |
Why it matters
- One of the clearest cases in this file of a cultivar whose value is invisible to the classification system it is filed under
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.
Blanc Mollet
A soft, pale, early Norman sweet apple that must be pressed almost as soon as it is picked, and whose name says exactly that about it.
Douce Coëtligné
A large, pale, genuinely sweet Breton apple with very little acid and very little tannin, grown for the sugar and body it puts into a blend rather than for any character of its own.
Doux Normandie
A Norman sweet apple grown for sugar and alcohol, one of the *douce* cultivars that supply the fermentable weight a bittersweet-heavy blend needs.
Foxwhelp
The oldest named English cider apple still grown, a Herefordshire bittersharp of extraordinary acidity whose identity has fractured into a family of sports, seedlings and impostors.
Gravensteiner
A famously aromatic early apple from the Danish–German borderlands, whose origin has been claimed for at least three countries, and the fruit that Nordic cider most often reaches for when it wants perfume.
Broxwood Foxwhelp
A Herefordshire selection of Foxwhelp from Broxwood, keeping much of the parent’s acidity in a fruit that is easier to grow, and the form most commonly planted today.
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.
- What temperature should cider ferment at — Most cider is fermented cool, commonly between about 12 and 18 °C. Cooler ferments keep more fruit aroma and run slower; above the low twenties the cider tends towards hot, solvent-like higher alcohols.
- 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 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 juice blending
- 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 makes a cider taste of apple blossom
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.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.