Cider apple
Pomme Grise
A small grey-russeted apple of the St Lawrence valley, of probable French origin, rich and nutty and long valued in Quebec both as a dessert fruit and as cider fruit.
Also written Pomme Gris, Grey Apple, Leather Coat.
- Classification
- Not classified under any recorded system
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Sometimes bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Sugar and body, Aroma, Vintage quality
- Origin
- The St Lawrence valley, with a probable French origin
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Vigour
- Low — a small, manageable tree
- Biennial bearing
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
How it is classified
No classification scheme has been recorded for Pomme Grise. That is common outside Europe: the English, French and Spanish systems were each built for their own fruit, and a cultivar grown where none of them applies simply has no class. What the fruit contributes to a blend is described below regardless — the class is a shorthand for that, not a substitute.
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 | Moderate | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | Slight | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Pronounced | |
| Body | Full |
Consistent Quebec and Vermont description of a small, dense, high-sugar russet with pronounced nutty aroma. No institutional juice analysis is held in CiderHQ’s register.
Dense, nutty and rich, with a concentrated sweetness and a light russet astringency at the finish.
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.
Measured analysis
CiderHQ holds no sourced juice analysis for Pomme Grise. 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
- Late
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Low — a small, manageable tree
- Cropping
- Slightly biennial
- Keeping
- Very good — holds in store for weeks
A small, slow, modest-cropping tree — the reason it was never planted commercially at scale.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Winter cold injury | low | Hardy enough for the St Lawrence valley, which is the precondition for anything grown in Quebec. |
| Apple scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- High sugar, comparable to the New York russets.
- A pronounced nutty russet aroma.
- Some skin astringency, more than most Quebec fruit.
- Low juice yield from small fruit on a small tree.
How it is used
- A prized dessert apple in Quebec and the Champlain valley through the nineteenth century.
- Pressed for Quebec farm cider, and used in modern craft and ice cider blends for gravity and aroma.
On its own
Sometimes bottled on its own
Its sugar and its aroma give a single-varietal cider real presence. The limiting factor is that there is very little of it — the tree is small and the crop modest.
About Pomme Grise
Pomme Grise is Quebec’s russet, and it is the one heritage cultivar in this file with a genuine claim to a French rather than an English or American lineage. Whether it crossed the Atlantic as a tree or as a pip is unresolved, and no French cultivar has been securely matched to it, so this record records both possibilities and settles neither.
What it does in a press is what the good North American russets do: it supplies concentration. The sugar is high, the aroma is nutty and distinctive, and there is a little skin astringency behind it — more than most fruit available in Quebec, though nothing that a West Country maker would call tannin. In ice cider, where the juice is concentrated further, that density is an asset.
The obstacle is quantity. The tree is small and slow, the fruit is small, and the crop is modest, so a Quebec producer with Pomme Grise has a component rather than a base. That is the recurring economics of the North American heritage cultivars: the fruit that presses most rewardingly is almost always the fruit that yields least, and the revival has had to build its volume from somewhere else.
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
Generally held to have come to New France from France, though no French cultivar has been securely identified with it. The alternative — that it arose in Quebec from French seed — is equally plausible on the evidence.
| Name | Kind | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Pomme Grise de Montréal | Regional name | Quebec. Used where distinction from other russets was needed in the St Lawrence trade. |
| Leather Coat | Regional name | Vermont and northern New York. |
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.
Golden Russet
The highest-gravity fruit in widespread North American cider use — a small bronze russet from New York whose juice regularly presses above 1.060 and which many revival makers treat as their benchmark cultivar.
Wickson Crab
A Californian dessert crab raised by Albert Etter, exceptional for carrying very high sugar and very high acid at the same time, and now one of the most sought-after cider cultivars in North America.
Manttoni
A Basque cultivar of good reputation with balanced acid and pronounced aroma, one of the cultivars a *sagardotegi* will name when describing a serious blend.
Roxbury Russet
Generally reckoned the oldest apple cultivar raised in North America — a Massachusetts russet from the seventeenth century, pressed for cider for as long as it has existed.
Golden Delicious
A West Virginia chance seedling of about 1890 that became one of the most planted and most bred-from apples in history — high in sugar, low in acid, and by volume one of the largest single inputs to cider worldwide.
Harrison
The cider apple of eighteenth-century New Jersey, believed extinct for most of the twentieth century and refound in the 1970s; small, russeted, very high in sugar and the nearest thing North America has to a vintage cultivar of its own.
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.
- Why is golden russet used for cider — Because it carries more sugar than almost anything else in the New England repertoire. A late-1970s Geneva analysis of finished cider from it gave 17.0 degrees Brix at pressing, the highest in that table, alongside 0.55 per cent acid.
- How do you blend cider
- What is ice cider — Ice cider is made by concentrating apple juice by freezing before fermentation, so that the ferment starts from a very high sugar level and stops sweet. It is a Quebec speciality with a protected definition there.
- How is ice cider made — Apple juice is frozen and the sugar-rich liquid separated from the ice, either by freezing pressed juice or by leaving fruit on the tree into winter. Fermentation then stops of its own accord well before the concentrated sugar is used up.
- How long can apples be kept before pressing
- Why does cider smell of apple skin
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.
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.
Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own
Ben Watson, The Countryman Press, first edition 1999; third edition 2013 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: first published 1999 by The Countryman Press, with five editions recorded and a 2008 printing scanned by the Internet Archive as ciderhardsweethi0000benw. The scan is access-restricted to the print-disabled collection. The site had registered this without a year; it now carries one, and the first-edition date matters because a general trade book on cider written in 1999 predates almost the whole of the North American cider revival it is sometimes cited about.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.