Dataset

The IFPC cider apple juice characterisation

Twelve French cider apple juices measured by the national technical institute in 2018 — the only French institutional dataset CiderHQ has opened, and the evidence that “French cider apple” is not a composition.

What do French cider apple juices actually measure?

Very different things from one another. Marie Ménard at 2,333 mg/L total polyphenols and Judor at 104 mg/L are both French cider apples grown for the same industry, and they are more than twentyfold apart. Peau de Chien reaches specific gravity 1.079, the highest sugar in the set, while Cuir d’âne sits at 1.049.

The dataset matters out of proportion to its size because the site holds a great many French cultivars and, until this, almost no French numbers: the classification records said which family a fruit belonged to and nothing said what the juice measured.

The programme

Transcribed from the source as published. Nothing in this panel is CiderHQ’s wording.

Site: France — orchards supplying the Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles
Period: 2018
Cultivars transcribed: 12
Measurements: 48
Values withheld: 12 — see limitations
Classifies under: french-classification

Climate. Northern French cider country, chiefly Normandy and Brittany: maritime, mild, wet, and the closest continental analogue to the English West Country. The source does not break the samples down by orchard, so the location here is as precise as the evidence allows.

Method. Twelve varieties, one harvest. Malic acid, total acidity, density, pH and total polyphenols measured on pressed juice; sensory profiling run alongside on the same juices. The assay behind the polyphenol column is not named, and the unit behind the total acidity column is not stated.

What the source says about itself

Presented at a technical day rather than published as a paper, which is why it is registered at research tier and not treated as peer-reviewed. The institute is the body that defines the French classification thresholds, so its own juice figures are the ones those thresholds were meant to be applied to.

What it adds

It attaches numbers to the French classification for the first time on this site, so a douce or an amère is not only a category label.
It is institutional rather than commercial, selected by expert advice as recent or commonly planted varieties, which makes it a picture of what the French industry is actually working with.
It demonstrates the range within a single national repertoire, which is the corrective to treating a country as a style.

What it cannot be asked

Stated as limits rather than as apology. A dataset with known bounds is more useful than one presented as complete.

Twelve varieties, one harvest, and the source does not break the sample down by orchard or region.
The total acidity column is withheld on every entry, with the reason attached. The presentation does not state its unit: at the French convention of sulphuric acid equivalents it should sit at about 0.73 times the malic figure, and it sits nearer 0.5, which matches no convention CiderHQ can identify. Publishing a number whose unit is a guess would be worse than publishing nothing, and the malic column — which the source does label — carries the same information.
Density is published in grams per litre and stored here as specific gravity by exact division. The source states no reference temperature, which is recorded in the method rather than assumed away.
The institute’s own site is served over plain HTTP and refuses a TLS handshake, so there is no https address to cite.

Why these figures are not universal

One French harvest, in northern French cider country — chiefly Normandy and Brittany, maritime, mild and wet. A single season in a maritime climate is a snapshot of a moving quantity, and the source does not say which orchards contributed, so the figures cannot even be tied to an appellation.

What was measured

Every property in the transcription, with how many cultivars carry it. A property measured on some cultivars and not others is a gap in the source, not in the transcription.

Properties recorded across 12 cultivars in The IFPC cider apple juice characterisation
Property	Cultivars	Reported in
Malic acid	12	Grams per litre
Specific gravity	12	Specific gravity
pH	12	pH
Total phenolics	12	Milligrams per litre

Total phenolics across every cultivar in this dataset that carries it — 12 of them, from 2332.9 down to 103.6 mg/L. Every figure here comes from this one programme, measured by one method in one place, which is the only arrangement under which a comparison like this is sound. Nothing on this chart may be read against another dataset’s column.
Cultivar	Total phenolics (mg/L)	Where it sits in this study’s range
Marie Ménard	2332.9
Peau de Chien	1604.3
Frequinette	1173.5
Marine Auffrais	1161.3
Cuir d’âne	989.1
Cimes	916.5
Doux Crasseux	899.3
Jaune de Vitré	787.8
Dabinett	550.9
Douce de l’Avent	539.7
Guillevic	213.8
Judor	103.6

Ordering only. Where a figure was published as a range the midpoint is used to place the row, and the range itself — not the midpoint — is what appears on the cultivar’s own page.

What it can be read beside

The commonest way to misuse this corpus is not to misread one figure but to put two side by side that were never measuring the same thing. This is the judgement, stated.

Whether The IFPC cider apple juice characterisation may be read in one column with the site’s other datasets
Dataset	Verdict	Why
The Long Ashton cider apple table	Not comparable	Malic acid in grams per litre against total acid as percent weight per volume, and phenolics in milligrams per litre against permanganate tannin as a percentage. Neither column converts.
The DOP Sidra de Asturias varietal characterisation	Not comparable	Two continental designations, two acid conventions, two phenolic conventions. The nearest thing to a shared axis is that both show enormous within-country range, which is a finding about repertoires rather than a comparison of figures.

Where a dataset is not listed, no judgement has been recorded and the safe reading is that the two have not been checked against each other. CiderHQ never averages across studies: how evidence is handled sets out why.

Cultivars in this dataset

Each carries this programme’s figures on its own page, alongside whatever else has measured it.

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.

Caractérisation de jus de pomme à cidre et analyse comparative avec des jus de pomme commerciaux
Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles (IFPC) · research institute · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 2018 harvest
A technical-day presentation by the French cider institute, retrieved and read in full on 2026-08-25. Twelve French cider varieties characterised for malic acid, total acidity, density, pH and total polyphenols, with sensory profiling on the same juices. The first French institutional juice figures CiderHQ has been able to open, and important out of proportion to their number because the site holds many French cultivars and previously held almost no French measurements. The total acidity column is not published by CiderHQ: the slide does not state its unit and the ratio to the malic figure matches no convention the site can identify.
Révision du décret cidre : le nouveau décret entre en vigueur au 1er juillet 2025
Union Nationale Interprofessionnelle Cidricole (UNICID), Jean-Louis Benassi · specialist organisation · passage verified 2026-08-24
The French cider interbranch organisation’s own briefing on the 2025 décret, read in full on 2026-08-24. It is registered because the primary text could not be retrieved verbatim and this one reproduces the operative sweetness table, and it is registered at tier 2 rather than tier 1 because an interbranch body explaining a decree is not the decree. Where it is cited, it is cited for what the instrument says, alongside the instrument.