Region
French Basque Country
The northern Basque provinces, where a cider tradition shared with Gipuzkoa across the border was largely lost in the twentieth century and deliberately rebuilt from the 1980s, complete with the cider-house season and the txotx pour.
Known locally as Ipar Euskal Herria.
Also written Iparralde, Pays Basque.
- Country
- France
- Parent region
- None — a top-level region
- Classification in use
- No named scheme recorded
- Protected designations
- None applying here
Described in full
- Shape
- A schematic strip of the north Spanish coast along the Bay of Biscay, running from Galicia in the west through Asturias and Cantabria to the Basque Country in the east. Three shaded zones mark the cider areas; the interior below is labelled as having no cider tradition.
- Why the band is so narrow
- Apples need the cool, wet Atlantic climate of the northern coast. The Meseta behind it is hot, dry and continental, and it is wine country rather than cider country. The line between the two is a climate boundary, not a cultural one.
- Asturias
- The largest Spanish cider region by a wide margin, with a protected designation of its own and a technological classification of its cultivars into acid, bitter and sweet groups that has no counterpart in the English scheme.
- Euskadi
- The Basque Country, drawn in a different fill because it is a separate tradition with its own protected name, its own cultivars, its own vocabulary and its own serving ritual. It is not a variant of the Asturian one.
- Galicia and Cantabria
- Both make cider and neither holds a protected name. They are drawn to show that the band does not stop at the two famous regions, and drawn faintly because the scale is much smaller.
- Precision
- Every shape here is indicative. The coastline is simplified to the point of being diagrammatic, and each zone marks roughly where a cider region sits rather than how far it reaches; no area on this figure is drawn to a boundary. Nothing should be measured off it, and where an exact limit matters the designation specification is the authority.
Climate and land
The first thing to know about a cider region, because it sets what the fruit can be. Ripening date, the acid that survives to the press and the sugar that reaches the vat are all decided here, and they are what makes one tradition's answers wrong for another's fruit.
The French Basque country sits where the Pyrenees meet the Atlantic, and it is one of the wettest parts of France. Rain falls through the year and heavily in autumn, humidity is high, winters are mild and frost is uncommon near the coast. Summers are warm but rarely hot, and cloud is frequent, so heat accumulation is moderate and fruit ripens slowly. As in Asturias and Gipuzkoa on the other side of the same mountain front, the effect on the juice is modest sugar and well-retained acid, which points the tradition towards a dry, sharp, comparatively low-alcohol cider rather than a sweet or heavily tannic one. High humidity through the growing season makes scab and canker constant problems, and the practical difficulty of getting a picked crop dry before milling is a real constraint on autumn work.
Soils
Acid soils over sandstone, schist and flysch on the hill country inland, with heavier alluvial ground in the valleys. Fertility is moderate, and the hill orchards sit on slopes both for drainage and to escape valley frost.
The orchards
How the fruit is actually grown here — tree form, planting, what else the ground is used for, and who owns it.
- Traditional orchards are small hillside plantings of standard trees attached to farmhouses, worked as one element of a mixed upland farm.
- The variety population is Basque rather than French: cultivars shared with Gipuzkoa and Navarre, selected for acid and for a wet climate, and distinct from the Norman and Breton palettes.
- Replanting since the 1980s has used both surviving local varieties and material from the Spanish Basque provinces, since the fruit tradition ignores the border.
- Orchards are grazed or mown beneath, and the fruit is gathered from the ground rather than picked.
- The sector is small and holdings are individually modest; there is no large commercial orchard base here.
The words used here
Each of these names something the tradition does. They are given in the local language because that is the form a reader will meet them in — on a label, on a cider-house door, or in a conversation about how the cider is poured.
| Term | Language | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| sagardo | Basque | Cider in Basque, from sagar (apple) and ardo (wine). The construction is telling: the drink is named as an apple wine rather than as a category of its own. |
| sagardotegi | Basque | A cider house: a working cider premises with vats and a fixed seasonal menu, where people eat and draw cider directly from the vat during the winter and spring season. |
| txotx | Basque | The call that opens a vat, and by extension the practice itself. On the call, drinkers gather and catch a thin stream of cider from the barrel into their glasses, taking a small measure at a time. |
| sagarnoa | Basque | A northern Basque form of the word for cider, used in the French provinces. |
| pitarra | Basque | A term used in parts of the Basque country for cider drawn and drunk young, from the vat rather than the bottle. |
History
How cider making here came to take the shape it has.
- Cider making in the northern Basque provinces belongs to the same Atlantic Basque tradition as that of Gipuzkoa, and was historically bound up with coastal life, including the provisioning of fishing and whaling voyages for which cider was a practical shipboard drink.
- The tradition declined severely through the twentieth century as vineyards, changing agriculture and depopulation reduced orchards, and by the middle of the century very little remained in production.
- Deliberate revival began in the 1980s, drawing on practice, varieties and the cider-house model from Gipuzkoa across the border rather than from French cider regions.
- The revived sector adopted the sagardotegi cider-house season and the txotx pour, so a Basque cider house on the French side operates in a recognisably Spanish Basque manner.
- The northern provinces sit outside the Spanish protected designation for Basque cider, so their producers work under the general French cider rules while operating within a Basque tradition — a mismatch between cultural and legal geography that is worth stating.
Culture
What the drink is for here, and the occasions and rooms it belongs to. This is not decoration around the cider — in several of these places it is the part that decides how the cider is made.
- Cider is served in the cider-house manner: poured in a thin stream from a height into the base of a wide glass, in small measures taken immediately, so that the cider is aerated momentarily before it is drunk.
- The cider-house season runs through the winter and early spring, when the new cider is tasted from the vats, and it is a communal meal setting rather than a bar.
- The accompanying meal follows the Basque pattern — salt cod, omelette, grilled beef, sheep’s cheese with quince paste and walnuts — and the food is as fixed as the drink.
- Basque is used for the vocabulary of the drink on both sides of the border: sagarnoa or sagardo for cider, sagardotegi for the cider house.
- The revival is explicitly a cultural project as well as an agricultural one, tied to Basque language and identity rather than to French regional gastronomy.
About French Basque Country
The French Basque country is a cider region that belongs to a tradition rather than to a country. Its fruit, its vocabulary, its serving practice and its cider-house season come from the Atlantic Basque world it shares with Gipuzkoa and Navarre, not from the Norman and Breton traditions that define French cider elsewhere. A visitor arriving from Normandy will recognise almost nothing.
The climate places it firmly with the Spanish Basque provinces and with Asturias: very wet, humid, mild, with moderate heat accumulation. Juice comes in with modest sugar and good acid, and the natural result of fermenting it fully is a dry, sharp, low-alcohol cider with a slight lactic edge and no residual sweetness. That is the drink the region makes, and it is what the txotx pour is designed to serve.
Its twentieth-century history is one of near-disappearance and deliberate reconstruction. The tradition had contracted to almost nothing by the mid-century, and the revival that began in the 1980s took its models — varieties, cider-house format, serving practice — from across the border. It is honest to describe the current sector as a restored tradition rather than a continuous one, and it is not a criticism: the reconstruction was done from within the same cultural community that had held the practice.
The legal position is awkward and worth naming. The protected designation for Basque cider covers the Spanish provinces, so producers in the French Basque country make a Basque cider under French national cider law, outside the designation that describes what they are doing. Cultural and regulatory geography do not line up here, and readers encountering the labels should know why.
The fruit grown here
Cultivars recorded as grown in this region, historically or currently. Each card says what the fruit is.
Cider apple
Txalaka
The most widely recognised Basque cider apple: a hard, sharp, late cultivar from Gipuzkoa that supplies much of the acid backbone of *sagardoa*.
Cider apple
Errezil
A celebrated Basque russet reinette from the village of Errezil, primarily an eating and cooking apple with a protected reputation, and used in cider where the crop allows.
Cider apple
Goikoetxe
An aromatic Basque cultivar from Bizkaia, valued for the fruit character it brings to a blend that is otherwise built on acid.
Cider apple
Moko
A Basque bitter cultivar, one of the few in a region whose fruit is otherwise almost entirely acid, used in small proportion for the grip it supplies.
What is made here
Styles this region is where they come from, or where they are characteristically made.
Dry cider
Cider fermented out or finished so that little fermentable sugar remains, leaving acid, tannin and alcohol to carry the palate.
Sidra natural
The still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, wild-fermented from local high-acid fruit and poured from a height to raise a momentary sparkle.
Euskal Sagardoa
Basque cider under its own protected designation, made from Basque-grown apples in the *sagardotegi* tradition of barrel service and dry, high-acid, still cider.
Wild-fermented cider
Cider fermented by the yeast population already present on the fruit and in the cellar, without an added cultured strain.
Cidre fermier
Farm-made French cider, pressed and fermented on the holding that grew the fruit, sold as an agricultural product of that farm rather than as a regional or industrial one.
Methods traditional here
Processes that belong to this region's practice rather than being applied to it from outside.
Blending
Combining separate lots of cider or perry into one, which in cider is the historically normal way of making the drink rather than a remedy applied when single lots disappoint.
Fermentation malolactique
Malolactic fermentation
A bacterial conversion of sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid, which lowers acidity, changes aroma, and in most traditional cider happens whether it was planned or not.
Broyage
Milling
Reducing whole fruit to a pulp so that the press has cell walls it can drain, rather than intact apples it can only bruise.
Racking
Moving cider off the sediment it has thrown, which both cleans the liquid and — by taking yeast and nitrogen away with the deposit — slows what is left of the ferment.
Fermentation spontanée
Wild fermentation
Letting the microflora already present on the fruit and in the press house carry the ferment, in a succession rather than as a single organism.
Hydraulic pressing
Pressing in which a pump drives fluid against a ram, so that a small pumped pressure becomes a large, controllable and repeatable load on the pomace.
Fermentation vessels
The container a cider ferments in — wood, stainless, plastic, glass or concrete — and how its permeability, thermal mass and resident microflora shape the result.
Fruit sorting
Taking rotten, mouldy and damaged fruit and foreign material out of the crop before it reaches the mill, which is the primary control on patulin in cider.
recogida
Shaking and collecting
Bringing fruit down with a pole or letting it fall, then gathering it from the orchard floor — the traditional way most cider and perry fruit has always been harvested.
Standard orchard systems
Widely spaced, tall-trunked, long-lived fruit trees over grassland — a family of related but genuinely different systems running from the Three Counties through Normandy to the Austrian meadows.
Protected designations that apply here
No protected designation or national definition on CiderHQ reserves a name for this area. That is a fact about the register rather than about the cider: a great deal of excellent cider is made in places no designation covers, and a designation would say nothing about how good it is.
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 does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
- How are apples milled for cider
- How do you blend cider
- What is malolactic fermentation — Malolactic fermentation is a bacterial conversion of sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid, releasing carbon dioxide. It lowers total acidity and raises pH, and in cider it is often the source of a farmyard or buttery note as well.
- What is racking in cider making — Racking is siphoning cider off the sediment it has thrown into a clean vessel, leaving the lees behind. It clarifies the cider and, in traditional practice, is also used to slow a ferment by removing yeast with the lees.
- What should i ferment cider in — Anything inert, cleanable and closable: glass demijohns, food-grade plastic, stainless steel, or a wooden cask if you can keep it sound. Vessel shape and material change how much oxygen the cider sees and how fast it clears.
Where to go next
- Cider and perry in France — The national picture this region sits inside, including how cider is legally defined there.
- All cider regions — The other traditions, each described in its own terms.
- Protected designations — What the law reserves a name for, and what it does not promise.
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.
Euskal Sagardoa / Sidra Natural del País Vasco protected designation
Eusko Label / Basque Government · designation authority · registered as competent for this subject
NEIKER Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development
NEIKER · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
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.
European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24