Every Commercial Disadvantage, Kept Anyway

If you were designing a grape to grow in a cool northern climate on a commercial basis, you would not design pinot noir.

The bunches are compact (the name comes from their resemblance to a pine cone) so berries press against each other and split, and once one goes the rot spreads through the cluster. The skins are thin, offering little protection and little pigment. It buds early, which in Burgundy means the shoots are out in April when frost is still entirely possible. It ripens early too, which sounds like an advantage and means the harvest lands in September, when the autumn rains arrive.

And it is genetically unstable, mutating readily, which makes it a nuisance to propagate consistently.

That last defect is also the reason there are hundreds of distinct pinot clones, and the reason pinot gris and pinot blanc exist at all; they are colour mutations of the same variety, not separate grapes. A vine that will not hold still generates variety, and variety is what a region with a thousand years to sort through it can exploit.

The propagation question has become one of the live arguments of the last thirty years.

A certified clone is propagated from a single mother plant with known virus status and predictable yield, which is why clonal material dominated replanting from the 1970s onward. Nurseries could supply it, banks would lend against it, and a grower knew what they were getting.

The cost is uniformity. A vineyard planted to one clone ripens together, produces berries of one size, and tastes narrower than the sum of its parts. Massale selection, taking cuttings from many vines across an old parcel, preserves a population rather than reproducing an individual, with a spread of ripening and character that many growers believe shows in the wine.

It is a real trade rather than an obvious improvement. Material from an old vineyard can carry leafroll or fanleaf virus, and the resulting planting is less uniform to farm. The growers making that trade are generally farming parcels where uniformity was never the objective, and a number now maintain their own nurseries.

Two things about the grape's appearance need dealing with, because both mislead newcomers badly.

The first is colour. Pinot's thin skins and low pigment produce pale wines. A young Chambertin can be lighter than an indifferent bottle from the Languedoc. Readers trained on deeply coloured reds take pallor for weakness, and a grower chasing colour by extending maceration will extract tannin they did not want. Pale is the default rather than a defect, and colour is close to useless as a guide to quality here.

The second is the reputation for difficulty, which is accurate about the vineyard and overstated about everywhere else. Oregon, Central Otago, Sonoma, Baden, Martinborough and the Ahr all make excellent pinot noir, and the gap to Burgundy has narrowed enormously since the 1980s. Whether any has matched a top grand cru is genuinely argued rather than settled, and what is no longer arguable is that these are serious wines rather than imitations.

Finally, the discovery that rearranged everybody's picture of where the grape sits.

In 1999 Carole Meredith's laboratory at Davis used DNA markers to test the parentage of chardonnay and found that it, along with gamay, aligoté, melon de bourgogne and twelve others, descends from the same cross: pinot noir with an obscure white grape called gouais blanc.

Gouais was so poorly regarded that it was periodically banned by decree. It was the peasant's grape, planted on the flat land, and it happened to grow alongside pinot in medieval Burgundy, and the two crossed repeatedly.

Sixteen varieties, including the most planted white grape in the world, from a cross nobody intended between something aristocratic and something nobody wanted. It is a good corrective to the idea that any of this was designed.