Perry pear
Plant de Blanc
The dominant poiré pear of the Domfrontais and the cultivar the Poiré Domfront appellation is built around.
Also written Plant de Blanc-Ivry, Plant Blanc.
- Classification
- Sweet — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Established as a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Aroma, Sugar and body, Vintage quality
- Origin
- The Domfrontais, southern Normandy
- Species
- Pyrus communis
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Biennial bearing
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
How it is classified
Perry pear classification
Sweet
Low acid, low tannin. Mild perry pears giving soft, light perry.
French practice describes poiré pears in its own vocabulary and does not use the English four-way scheme. The placement here reads IFPC’s description of a low-acid, lightly tannic, aromatic fruit onto the English categories, and is CiderHQ’s mapping rather than a classification IFPC makes.
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 | Slight | |
| Astringency | Noticeable | |
| Aroma | Pronounced | |
| Body | Medium |
IFPC and appellation descriptions of an aromatic, low-acid pear with light tannin, mapped onto CiderHQ’s bands.
A markedly aromatic, low-acid juice with light tannin — the fruit responsible for the floral, pear-fruited character that distinguishes Domfrontais poiré from English perry.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Plant de Blanc, 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
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.
Sorbitol10.0–30.0 g/L
Various growing sites; the literature pools pear juice analyses rather than reporting by orchard · Various journals and institute reports
A general pear juice figure rather than an analysis of Plant de Blanc. It is central on this record because Poiré Domfront is made by arresting the ferment with sugar still present, and the sweetness a drinker meets is therefore part residual sugar and part sorbitol — two different things that taste the same. The range is not tied to a single study or season.
A sugar alcohol abundant in pears and largely unfermentable, which is why perry keeps a sweetness cider does not. Measured in grams per litre.
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.
In the orchard
- Harvest window
- Mid
- Flowering
- Not recorded
- Vigour
- Very vigorous — a large tree that takes years to settle to cropping
- Cropping
- Markedly biennial — heavy and light years alternate
- Keeping
- Poor — mill soon after picking
October in the Domfrontais, gathered from the ground beneath tall standard trees. As in England the window is short, and French practice likewise takes the fruit as it falls.
The tall standard trees of the Domfrontais come into bearing slowly and alternate once mature, as English perry pears do.
Short, though French practice allows a period of maturing after gathering before pressing, which is judged by feel rather than by a fixed interval.
Mid-season. Self-incompatible, and Domfrontais orchards are accordingly mixed rather than monovarietal.
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 | — |
| Self-incompatibility | high | — |
Juice and pressing
- Low acid with light tannin
- Strongly aromatic
- Retains sorbitol sweetness through fermentation
How it is used
- The backbone of Poiré Domfront, the appellation covering the pear orchards of the Domfrontais in southern Normandy.
- Pressed and fermented slowly at low temperature, with the ferment arrested to leave the poiré sweet and naturally sparkling.
On its own
Established as a single-varietal cider
The appellation requires Plant de Blanc to dominate — the specification sets a minimum of around forty per cent, a figure that sits in the cahier des charges and can be revised — and poiré made largely or wholly from it is the region’s defining product.
About Plant de Blanc
The Domfrontais, in the south of Normandy on the edge of the Bocage, is the one place outside the English and Welsh border counties where perry is a serious regional product rather than a curiosity. Its pears are grown on tall standard trees in permanent grassland grazed beneath, its poiré carries a protected appellation, and Plant de Blanc is the cultivar the whole thing rests on.
The fruit is low in acid, lightly tannic and strongly aromatic, and that aromatic character is the clearest sensory difference between Domfrontais poiré and Three Counties perry. Where an English perry is often defined by tannin and structure or by the absence of both, a poiré made largely from Plant de Blanc leads with floral and pear-fruit aroma.
Method matters as much as fruit. Domfrontais poiré is fermented slowly and cold and the ferment is arrested with sugar still in the liquid, so the finished drink is sweet, lightly sparkling and low in alcohol. That means the sweetness a drinker meets comes from two sources at once — sugar the yeast never got to, and sorbitol the yeast could never have taken — which are indistinguishable on the palate and entirely distinct in the cellar. Only the first can restart in bottle.
The appellation is built around this cultivar: its specification requires Plant de Blanc to make up the greater part of the fruit, which ties the identity of a protected product to a single pear in a way no English perry pear has ever been tied.
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 rather than record, as with the English perry pears. The cultivar is closely tied to the Domfrontais and is not significantly grown elsewhere.
Why it matters
- The cultivar around which a protected French appellation is built, which is a status no English perry pear has.
- Grown on tall standard trees in orchards that are managed as permanent grassland with grazing beneath, a system that keeps the landscape as well as the fruit.
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.
Taynton Squash
A Gloucestershire pear named in seventeenth-century writing as one of the finest for perry, reduced to very few trees by the twentieth century and propagated back from them.
Oldfield
A Worcestershire perry pear with a nineteenth-century show reputation, giving a light, low-acid perry that has been made single-variety for well over a century.
Berllanderi Red
The red-fruited pear of the Berllanderi pair, found on the same Monmouthshire holding and giving a softer, sweeter juice.
Merrylegs
A Monmouthshire perry pear from the group of cultivars named for the effects of their perry, giving a soft, low-acid juice.
Painted Lady
A strikingly flushed perry pear grown on both sides of the Welsh border, whose name has been applied to more than one tree and whose identity is not settled.
Pine
A Three Counties perry pear whose name claims a pineapple character in the fruit, a comparison that was a standard compliment in English fruit naming.
Styles it is characteristic of
Poiré
French perry, made chiefly in southern Normandy and Maine from local perry pears, characteristically sweet, low in alcohol and firmly sparkling.
Poiré Domfront
The controlled appellation perry of the Domfrontais in southern Normandy, made predominantly from the Plant de Blanc pear on high-standard trees and finished sweet, low in alcohol and bottle-conditioned.
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.
- What is perry — Perry is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting the juice of pears, traditionally of specific perry pear cultivars rather than eating pears. It is to pears what cider is to apples, and has its own history in the three counties of England and in Normandy.
- 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 is sparkling cider made
- What is keeving — Keeving is a technique for starving a ferment of nitrogen so that it stops before all the sugar is gone, leaving a naturally sweet cider. Pectin is made to gel and float as a brown cap, carrying nutrients and yeast out of the juice with it.
- When are cider apples harvested — In the northern hemisphere the cider harvest runs from about September to November, with late bittersweets such as Dabinett and Vilberie coming in last. Cider fruit is generally picked riper than dessert fruit, and often gathered from the ground.
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 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.
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.
Research Evidence standard for this record. What that means.