Perry pear
Champagne
A Domfrontais poiré pear whose name reflects the sparkling character of the region’s drink rather than any connection to the wine region.
Also written Poire Champagne.
- Classification
- Medium sharp — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Rarely bottled on its own
- Blend role
- Acid lift, Aroma
- Origin
- The Domfrontais, southern Normandy
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
Perry pear classification
Medium sharp
Moderate acid with low to moderate tannin.
Mapped from French descriptions of a moderately acid, lightly tannic pear onto the English categories.
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 | High | |
| Tannin | Light | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | None | |
| Astringency | Slight | |
| Aroma | Present | |
| Body | Medium |
French descriptive material on a moderately acid, aromatic poiré pear.
A fresh, moderately sharp juice with some aroma, contributing lift to a blend that would otherwise be soft.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Champagne, 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 Champagne. 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
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Vigorous
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
October in the Domfrontais.
Mid-season. Self-incompatible.
Pears are not self-fertile. A variety needs another in blossom at the same time to set fruit, which is why the flowering band matters more in a perry orchard than the harvest window does.
Disease and pest susceptibility
| Issue | Susceptibility | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Pear scab | moderate | — |
Juice and pressing
- Moderate acid
- Light tannin
- Some aromatic character
How it is used
- Blended into Domfrontais poiré for acidity and freshness.
On its own
Rarely bottled on its own
A blending cultivar rather than one made alone.
About Champagne
The name is a claim about the drink, not about the fruit or about the wine region. Domfrontais poiré is naturally sparkling: the ferment is stopped with sugar still present and the carbon dioxide is generated in bottle, giving a lightly sparkling, low-alcohol, sweet drink. Calling a pear Champagne was a way of saying it made a lively poiré, and the comparison was reached for in Normandy for the same reason English growers reached for Brandy and Sack.
The pear contributes acidity and some aroma. In a blend built on low-acid fruit that is exactly what is wanted, and it does the same job as Fausset with rather more scent behind it.
It is worth noting that the sparkle and the sweetness in Domfrontais poiré have separate causes, and that only one of them can be interfered with. The sparkle and part of the sweetness come from a ferment deliberately arrested with sugar still in the bottle, which is a live condition requiring cold and care. The rest of the sweetness is sorbitol, which is inert: no yeast will touch it, it cannot restart, and it would be there even if the poiré had fermented to complete dryness.
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
Local tradition. The name is generally read as a reference to the lively, sparkling quality of the poiré, and there is no evidence of a connection to the Champagne region.
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.
Blakeney Red
The most widely planted perry pear of the Three Counties, taking its name from the Gloucestershire village of Blakeney and grown for perry, for canning and, during the First World War, for dye.
Gregg’s Pit
A Herefordshire perry pear named after the Much Marcle holding where the original tree still stands, and one of the few perry pears whose parent tree can be visited.
Hendre Huffcap
The most highly regarded of the Huffcap group of perry pears, taking its first name from a Monmouthshire farm and its second from a word for a drink strong enough to lift a hat.
Moorcroft
An early Malvern-country perry pear, known as Malvern Hills as often as by its own name, and at the centre of one of the sharpest identity disputes in perry.
Stinking Bishop
A Dymock perry pear named after a nineteenth-century grower called Bishop, and now better known through the washed-rind cheese that is bathed in its perry.
Thorn
One of the oldest named English perry pears, recorded in the seventeenth century and still valued for a quick, light perry that is ready before most others.
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 stop cider from fermenting — By removing the yeast, by chilling, by filtering it out, by pasteurising, or by a combination — and in practice a home maker cannot reliably stop a ferment mid-way with chemicals alone. Sorbate prevents yeast multiplying but will not stop an active ferment.
- How much pressure builds up in a bottle of cider — Enough to matter. Every gram of sugar fermented in a sealed bottle produces gas, and a bottle not rated for it can fail. The French cider appellations require a minimum of 1.0 to 1.5 bar at 20 °C, and a bottle-conditioned cider can go well beyond that if it was filled with more sugar than intended.
- What is juice blending
- How are perry pears classified — Perry pears are conventionally divided by acid and tannin into sweet, medium sharp, bittersharp and bittersweet, following the scheme used in the English perry literature. Sorbitol content matters too, and it does not appear in the classes.
- What is sparkling perry
- 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.
Research on pear juice composition and sorbitol in perry
Various journals and institute reports · peer-reviewed literature · registered as competent for this subject
The evidence base for the single most important chemical difference between cider and perry: pears carry substantial sorbitol, which yeast does not ferment, so a fully fermented perry retains sweetness a fully fermented cider cannot.
Traditional record Evidence standard for this record. What that means.