Perry pear
Rouge Vigné
A red-fruited Domfrontais poiré pear contributing colour and tannin to the region’s blends.
Also written Rouge Vigne, Poire Rouge Vigné.
- Classification
- Bittersweet — Perry pear classification
- Harvest
- Mid (Late September to mid October)
- Single varietal
- Not suited to a single-varietal cider
- Blend role
- Tannin and structure, Bittersweet base
- 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
Bittersweet
Low acid with substantial tannin — the class that gives perry grip.
Mapped from French descriptions of a coloured, tannic, low-acid pear onto the English scheme.
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 | Firm | |
| Sugar | Moderate | |
| Bitterness | Moderate | |
| Astringency | Drying | |
| Aroma | Restrained | |
| Body | Medium |
French descriptive material on a coloured, tannic poiré pear.
A red-skinned fruit giving a coloured, drying juice with low acidity.
Aroma
No aroma descriptors are recorded for Rouge Vigné, 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 Rouge Vigné. 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
- Substantial tannin
- Low acid
- Coloured juice
How it is used
- Blended for tannin and colour in Domfrontais poiré.
On its own
Not suited to a single-varietal cider
A blend component, not a cultivar the region makes alone.
About Rouge Vigné
Rouge Vigné is the red pear of the Domfrontais, contributing both colour and tannin to a blend. The two go together more often than not: anthocyanin-rich skins and tannic flesh tend to occur in the same fruit, and a coloured perry or poiré is usually a slightly more structured one.
Its spelling is unstable, with and without the accent, which is the ordinary condition of a locally transmitted name. CiderHQ records both forms rather than choosing between them, because a reader searching for one should find the other.
What is known of the cultivar is limited to descriptive material. It is low in acid and substantially tannic, used in small proportion, and grown on the same tall standard trees in grazed grassland as the rest of the Domfrontais crop — an orchard system that produces very large, very long-lived trees, and a landscape that the appellation exists in part to maintain.
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, and the accent is written inconsistently across records — Rouge Vigné and Rouge Vigne both appear.
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.
Antricotin
A tannic Domfrontais poiré pear used to give structure to blends led by the region’s softer aromatic fruit.
Coppy
A tannic perry pear of the Welsh border country, known from few trees and giving a juice with unusual grip for its class.
Red Longdon
One of four perry pears carrying the name of the Worcestershire parish of Longdon, distinguished by its red-flushed fruit and a juice with more tannin than acid.
Red Pear
A tannic Herefordshire perry pear whose generic name has been applied to red-fruited pears generally, making orchard records that use it almost impossible to interpret.
Carisi
A tannic Domfrontais poiré pear, one of the cultivars that gives the region’s blends structure.
Harley Gum
A Herefordshire perry pear whose name records a gum exuded by the tree, and one of the more distinctive names in a fruit full of them.
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 is juice blending
- 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.
- 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 blakeney red
- What is normandy cider
- What does poire mean
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.