Glossary · Law and labelling
Pure juice requirement
Definition
The French rule that cidre and poiré must be produced from apple or pear juice, or from their concentrate reconstituted to the original strength, without added water beyond that reconstitution.
- Subject
- Law and labelling
In more detail
This is the sharpest structural difference between French and British cider law. It forecloses the dilution model that United Kingdom apparent-juice-content rules permit, and it is why the French category has no equivalent of white cider.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Law and labelling
Apparent juice content
The proportion of a cider that is treated as having come from apple juice, calculated for excise purposes from the product’s composition rather than measured directly at the mill.
Cider
Cidre fermier
French farm cider: made on the holding, from the holding’s own fruit, by the farmer. The term describes the production unit rather than a taste profile.
Cider
Cidre bouché
French cider sold in a heavy bottle closed with a mushroom cork and wire cage, sparkling from fermentation continuing in the bottle. Literally "corked cider".
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
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.
Légifrance, JORF texte n° JORFTEXT000051223792 · legislation · retrieved 2026-08-24 · covers In force from 1 July 2025; “artisanal” and “rosé” from 1 January 2026
Opened on 2026-08-24, and it turned out that the entry CiderHQ had was describing a repealed instrument. The décret of 20 February 2025 replaces the 1953 décret and the 1987 one that amended it, and it changes the thing this site had been repeating: the doux, demi-sec and brut categories are no longer residual-sugar bands. They are now defined on acquired alcoholic strength together with density at 20 °C, an extra-brut tier has been added, and the four bands deliberately overlap so that a producer can place a product with a hydrometer rather than a sugar analysis. The pages that said otherwise have been corrected. What could not be done is a verbatim read: legifrance.gouv.fr returns HTTP 403 to retrieval, so the text was read through a summarising fetch and every operative figure was then checked independently against the UNICID interbranch briefing, which reproduces the table. The two agree.
Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité (INAO)
INAO · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24
The Cidre Pays d’Auge cahier des charges was read in full on 2026-08-24, in the version homologated by arrêté of 17 January 2026 and published in the Journal officiel on 21 January. That qualification is not decoration. A revision adopted by the Comité national on 10 September 2025 is currently under the procédure nationale d’opposition, is clearly marked as not prejudging the final text, and specifies carbonation differently from the text in force — as grams of CO2 per litre rather than as a minimum pressure in bar. A summary citing the draft would have put a figure on the page that no producer is held to. CiderHQ records the operative text and says which one it is.