Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) · Other product
Pommeau de Normandie
The Norman appellation for pommeau, a fortified apéritif made by blending unfermented apple must with Calvados and maturing the blend in oak.
This record was taken as at 2026-08-23 and describes an instrument administered in France.
- Kind
- Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC)
- Product
- Other product
- Country
- France
- Regions covered
- Normandy, Pays d’Auge
- Register
- EU register of geographical indications, file PGI-FR-01978, verified against the register on 2026-08-25. The date is the protection date of the original EU spirit drinks regulation rather than an individual registration: the 1989 instrument protected a schedule of existing national names at a stroke.
- Record taken as at
- 2026-08-23
- Registered on
- 1989-06-12
CiderHQ records the structure of a specification: that it defines an area, that it restricts the fruit, that it sets a minimum strength or a sweetness band. Where a figure was not verified against the register itself, this page says a threshold exists and stops there rather than reproducing a number it cannot trace. Knowing that a limit is written down, and where it is written down, is worth more than a plausible figure.
Designation rules change. Specifications are amended, and the amendments do not announce themselves. Anyone relying on this commercially — labelling a product, drafting a claim, buying under the name — must read the current specification on the register itself rather than any summary of it, including this one.
Read the register: INAO
What the specification requires
Each requirement is recorded as a claim with its jurisdiction, its as-of date and the source it rests on. Requirements that could not carry all three are not shown.
The specification in force is the cahier des charges homologated by arrêté of 9 December 2025, published in the Journal officiel on 18 December 2025 and in the Bulletin officiel 52-2025. The appellation itself was recognised by décret of 10 April 1991, and the product is entered on the European register of spirit-drink geographical indications under Article 33 of Regulation (EU) 2019/787, in the category “other spirit drinks”.
Primary authority France (appellation d’origine contrôlée) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · INAO, European Commission
Pommeau de Normandie is made by stopping the fermentation of cider-apple must with cider brandy holding the Calvados, Calvados Pays d’Auge or Calvados Domfrontais appellation. Growing and harvesting the apples, making and muting the must, ageing and bottling all take place inside the geographical area.
Primary authority France (appellation d’origine contrôlée) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · INAO
A pommeau is not a fortified cider. Nothing is ever fermented to completion: the spirit arrests the ferment while most of the sugar is still sugar, which is why the finished product carries both the fruit of an unfermented must and the strength of a spirit.
Only cider apple varieties may be used, listed by category in an annex to the specification. Phenolic varieties must occupy at least 70% of the identified orchard area, and unlisted varieties are permitted only on high stems, up to 20% of the identified area, where they count as phenolic. High-stem orchards are limited to 280 trees per hectare with at least 5 metres between trees; bush orchards run above 280 and up to 1,000 per hectare. Irrigation is prohibited once the trees come into production.
Primary authority France (appellation d’origine contrôlée) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · INAO
Musts may be clarified by pectic settling — depectinisation or défécation — but filtration of the must is prohibited. Any operation intended to alter the natural sugar content of the musts is prohibited, as is any addition of preservatives or antioxidants and any use of sterilised, concentrated or chaptalised musts. At the moment of muting, the musts must carry a minimum natural sugar content of 108 grams per litre, measured as the mean of the year’s cuvées.
Primary authority France (appellation d’origine contrôlée) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · INAO
Filtering the must is banned while pectic settling is encouraged, which is the same preference for gentle clarification that runs through the Norman cider appellations. A filtered must would arrive stripped of the colloidal material the ageing depends on.
Muting must be carried out at the same site where the juice was extracted. The Calvados used must have been held in oak for at least twelve months from the end of distillation, must be at least 65% vol at the moment of muting, and must have been made by the same operator who produces the must. Muting brings the acquired strength of the product to between 15% and 20% vol, and must be completed before 15 February of the year following the start of harvest.
Primary authority France (appellation d’origine contrôlée) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · INAO
The requirement that one operator both distils the spirit and presses the juice is unusual and severe. It rules out buying in Calvados to mute a must, and it means every producer of Pommeau de Normandie is necessarily also a distiller.
The product is aged in vessels of sessile or pedunculate oak, or their hybrid, in cellars whose humidity and temperature are regulated naturally. Ageing lasts at least fourteen months after muting. It may be released only from 1 April of the year following the end of the muting period and at least from the end of the fifteenth month after muting, and only in bottle, filled by an approved élaborateur — except for consignments intended for use in cooking.
Primary authority France (appellation d’origine contrôlée) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · INAO
The blend must draw at least 70% of its volume from phenolic varieties, with no single variety exceeding 50%. At sale the product must show an acquired alcoholic strength between 16% and 18% vol and an unfermented sugar content above 69 grams per litre.
Primary authority France (appellation d’origine contrôlée) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · INAO
The Pommeau du Maine specification, comparing itself with this one, quotes the Normandy residual sugar figure as 68 grams per litre. The Normandy specification’s own text says 69. CiderHQ records the figure from the instrument it belongs to and notes the discrepancy rather than choosing silently between them.
The specification describes the product as ranging in colour from straw yellow to deep mahogany, with an aromatic complexity in which fruity, empyreumatic, spiced and woody notes can frequently be discerned, arising from the marriage of the fruit’s aromas with the spirit’s during ageing.
Primary authority France (appellation d’origine contrôlée) · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · INAO
About Pommeau de Normandie
Pommeau sits between cider and Calvados and belongs entirely to neither. Fresh apple must is blended with Calvados before it can ferment; the alcohol stops the yeast, and what remains is the fruit’s own sugar suspended in a spirit base. The blend is then aged in oak, which softens the join between the two components and gives the amber colour.
The appellation exists because the technique is easy to imitate badly. Requiring the must and the spirit to come from the same Norman area, in stated proportions, prevents the name being applied to sweetened apple-flavoured spirit; requiring a minimum time in wood prevents it being sold the week it was blended. It is a French appellation of origin, administered by INAO like the cider and Calvados appellations, and it is worth noting that pommeau is a comparatively modern formalisation of an old farmhouse practice rather than an ancient protected category.
The designation makes no claim about how any bottling tastes, and it does not restrict the technique — apple mistelles are made in Brittany, in the Maine and outside France altogether. What it restricts is the name, and the geography and method that name is allowed to imply.
Styles this designation covers
Categories whose definition or characteristic practice this specification governs.
Where it applies
The areas named by the specification, each described in its own terms.
Normandie
Normandy
The largest and most codified cider region in France, where fruit is grown in grazed orchard-meadows, juice is stripped of nutrient by keeving before fermentation, and the finished cider is expected to be sweet, aromatic and low in alcohol rather than dry.
Pays d’Auge
The Norman heartland of appellation cider and of pot-still Calvados: a small area of heavy clay, hedged pasture and dairy farms whose cider is defined by regulation as much as by tradition.
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 normandy cider
- Where is cider made in france — Principally in Normandy and Brittany, with smaller traditions in the Perche, Maine, Savoie and the French Basque Country. The Pays d’Auge and the Domfrontais both carry protected appellations.
- What is the pays d auge — The Pays d’Auge is the heartland of Norman cider, a country of clay soils and standard orchards east of Caen. Its cider and its calvados both carry appellations of their own.
Where to go next
- All protected designations — Every reserved name on CiderHQ, grouped by country, with what each kind of instrument does.
- Cider and perry in France — How cider is legally defined and taxed in the country administering this name.
- How CiderHQ handles evidence — Why a requirement here states a structure rather than a figure.
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 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.