The DOP Sidra de Asturias varietal characterisation

How does Asturias classify its cider apples, and why can the figures not be compared with English ones?

Asturias does not sort cider fruit into four classes. It sorts it into nine technological blocks, on acidity and total phenols, and the blocks are not the English quadrants with Spanish names on them. A fruit can be semiácido-amargo or amargo-semiácido — the order of the words is the difference between mostly semi-acid and somewhat bitter, and mostly bitter and somewhat semi-acid — and no English class maps onto either.

The acidity is published in grams per litre of sulphuric acid, the Spanish convention, not as malic acid the way English and North American analyses report it. The two are not interchangeable: sulphuric-acid equivalents run about 1.37 times lower than malic-acid equivalents for the same juice.

The programme

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

Site: Asturias, northern Spain
Period: Published characterisation, retrieved 2026-08-24
Cultivars transcribed: 56
Measurements: 114
Values withheld: None
Classifies under: asturian-classification

Climate. Atlantic and markedly wet — cool summers, mild winters and high rainfall on the Bay of Biscay coast, a climate that suits high-acid fruit and long, cool ferments.

Method. Total acidity expressed as grams per litre of sulphuric acid, the Spanish convention; total polyphenols as grams per litre of tannic acid. Characterisation carried out by the fruit-research programme of SERIDA and published by the Consejo Regulador.

What the source says about itself

Dessert varieties are excluded from the designation outright. The Consejo sorts admitted fruit into nine technological blocks on acidity and phenolic concentration, a finer and differently-shaped grid than the English four.

What it adds

It is the clearest evidence on the site that translating one national classification into another destroys information. Nine blocks cannot be projected onto four quadrants without discarding the distinction the ninth block exists to make.
It covers fifty-six varieties — the largest single national repertoire the site holds figures for outside the English one.
It is a regulatory document as well as a dataset: these are the varieties the designation admits, so the characterisation and the legal specification are the same act.

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.

Two properties per variety — titratable acidity and total polyphenols — and no sugar, no pH, no yield.
The characterisation is published as a settled table rather than as a study, so no seasons, no replicates and no dispersion are given.
Dessert varieties are excluded from the designation outright, so the dataset describes admitted cider fruit rather than Asturian apples in general.
CiderHQ stores the published figure in the published convention and converts nothing. A 4.7 g/L Asturian figure sitting unlabelled beside a 4.7 g/L English one would be a straightforward falsehood.

Why these figures are not universal

The Asturian coast is Atlantic and markedly wet — cool summers, mild winters, high rainfall on the Bay of Biscay — a climate that suits high-acid fruit and long, cool ferments, and the figures carry that. More importantly, the classification is jurisdictional: a variety is in a technological block because the Consejo Regulador places it there for the purposes of a protected designation, which is a legal act as much as an analytical one.

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 56 cultivars in The DOP Sidra de Asturias varietal characterisation
Property	Cultivars	Reported in
Titratable acidity	56	Grams per litre
Total phenolics	56	Grams per litre
Fruit yield	2	Tonnes per hectare

Total phenolics across every cultivar in this dataset that carries it — 56 of them, from 2.4 down to 0.5 g/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 (g/L)	Where it sits in this study’s range
Amariega	2.4
Clarina	2.1
Lin	2
Meana	2
Picón	2
Montés de La Llamera	1.9
Coloradona	1.8
Corchu	1.8
Martina	1.8
Montoto	1.6
San Justo	1.4
Sucu	1.4
Durona de Tresali	1.3
Montés de flor	1.3
Regona	1.3
Solarina	1.3
Arbeya	1.2
Durón d'Arroes	1.2
Ernestina	1.2
Fuentes	1.2
Miyeres	1.2
Panquerina	1.2
Peñarudes	1.2
Carrandona	1.1
Carrió	1.1
Dura	1.1
Paraguas	1.1
Perico	1.1
Perracabiella	1.1
Prieta	1.1
Repinaldo de hueso	1.1
Chata blanca	1
Collaos	1
Limón Montés	1
Mariñana	1
Reineta encarnada	1
Repinaldo Caravia	1
Teórica	1
De la Riega	0.9
Durón encarnado	0.9
Fresnosa	0.9
Josefa	0.9
Perezosa	0.9
Blanquina	0.8
Raxao	0.8
Reineta Caravia	0.8
Reineta pinta	0.8
Verdialona	0.8
Xuanina	0.8
Cristalina	0.7
San Roqueña	0.7
Celso	0.6
Antonona	0.5
Chata encarnada	0.5
María Elena	0.5
Verdosa	0.5

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 DOP Sidra de Asturias varietal characterisation may be read in one column with the site’s other datasets
Dataset	Verdict	Why
Everything else on the site	Not comparable	No acidity figure here may be read beside a malic-acid figure from anywhere else on the site without conversion, and CiderHQ does not convert it. Multiply by about 1.37 to reach malic if you must, and then remember that the sample, season and laboratory still differ.
The IFPC cider apple juice characterisation	Not comparable	Both continental, both regulated traditions, and neither reports acid the way the other does — the IFPC set publishes malic acid, this one sulphuric equivalents. The phenolic columns differ too: tannic acid equivalents here, and the French set does not state its assay.

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.

Denominación de Origen Protegida Sidra de Asturias
Consejo Regulador de la DOP Sidra de Asturias · designation authority · passage verified 2026-08-24
The regulating council for Asturian cider. Read on 2026-08-24, and it turned out to carry far more than a permitted-variety list: an agronomic and technological characterisation of each admitted variety, with total acidity, total polyphenols, vigour, flowering, ripening, cropping and susceptibility to fungal disease. The characterisation is credited to SERIDA’s fruit-research programme. Two things it settles are corrections to what CiderHQ previously held: Asturias sorts cider fruit into nine technological blocks rather than five, and it publishes acidity as sulphuric acid rather than malic. The figures are transcribed into `data/trials/serida-asturias.ts` and cite this source, because this is where they were read.
Servicio Regional de Investigación y Desarrollo Agroalimentario (SERIDA)
Principado de Asturias · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The Asturian regional agri-food research service, and the technical authority behind the Asturian cultivar classification and the analysis of sidra natural. SERIDA’s own site has not been opened; what CiderHQ has read is SERIDA’s varietal characterisation as republished by the Consejo Regulador of DOP Sidra de Asturias, which credits it explicitly. The Asturian measurements therefore cite the Consejo rather than SERIDA — citing the body that did the work, at a document CiderHQ has not seen, would be exactly the kind of borrowed authority this register exists to prevent.