Cider apple
Rouget de Dol
A red-skinned bittersweet from the Dol country of eastern Brittany, sitting between the Breton and Norman traditions in both geography and character.
Also written Rouget.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — French cider apple families
- Harvest
- Late (Late October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure, Bittersweet base, Late season
- Origin
- Around Dol-de-Bretagne, Ille-et-Vilaine
- Species
- Malus domestica
- Flowering
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
How it is classified
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.
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 | Moderate | |
| Sugar | High | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
French bittersweet family placement.
A moderate, slightly resinous bitterness with more acid than a Norman bittersweet usually carries.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Rouget de Dol, 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 Rouget de Dol. 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
- Pollination group 4
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Good
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Coloured must
- Moderate tannin with a little more acid than the Norman equivalents
How it is used
- Blending fruit in eastern Brittany, on the boundary with the Norman tradition
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
Not a tradition; its acid would carry a single ferment further than most Breton bittersweets, but nobody has made a habit of it.
About Rouget de Dol
Rouget de Dol comes from the eastern edge of Brittany, where the province meets the Norman marshland, and its character reflects that position. It carries the tannin of a bittersweet with rather more acid than the Norman fruit of the same class, which makes it more self-sufficient in a blend and less dependent on a sharp partner.
The Dol country is worth a note in itself. It is a low-lying coastal district with a long orchard history, close enough to Normandy that cultivars and practice moved across the boundary freely, and cultivars from this zone often resist neat regional assignment. Calling Rouget de Dol a Breton apple is correct administratively and slightly misleading pomologically.
It is now uncommon and grown mostly in local and conservation plantings. Nothing about it suggests it was displaced for being poor; it was displaced for the ordinary reason, which is that it is strongly biennial, unsuited to bush orchards, and had no advocate when the plantings were made.
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 its colour and its place, which is the most common naming pattern in Breton fruit and the least informative about origin.
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.
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.
Bedan
A mild Norman bittersweet, planted more widely across the Domfrontais and the Pays d’Auge than almost any other traditional cultivar, and valued as much for how its juice keeves as for how it tastes.
Bisquet
A reliable, regular-cropping Norman bittersweet planted heavily in modern orchards precisely because it does not do the one thing most traditional French cider apples do, which is crop every other year.
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.
Argile Rouge
A late, dark-skinned Norman bittersweet whose name refers to the heavy red clay soils it was selected on, and which behaves very differently on lighter ground.
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.
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 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 does cidre de bretagne igp actually guarantee — That the apples were grown and the cider made in the area, and that the fruit met a measured tannin floor. It permits concentrate to 40 per cent of the must, added water and injected gas, all of which the French appellations of origin forbid.
- What apple is breton cider made from — Kermerrien is the Breton bitter most often named on a bottle — firmly tannic, distinctly aromatic, and one of the few French cider cultivars with a genuine claim to standing alone rather than being blended.
- What does cidre fermier mean
- What is breton 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.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.