Grape & Grain | Why it’s so hard to pin down where a pinot noir comes from
As the quality of wines made with the pinot grape continue to improve, most just seem to get more like Burgundy’s best, giving Hong Kong would-be Master of Wine Sarah Heller exam jitters
After weeks of trying to channel How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Master of Wine Exam, I’ll capitulate and revisit one of my many exam lowlights. Most people’s exams don’t involve alcoholic drinks (at least not concurrently), but I imagine everyone can recall an exam question that made them want one.
Certain grapes are considered a boon to blind tasters. Pinot noir is one such – a pale ruby beacon of hope in a daunting sea of purple. The promisingly pale first three glasses of 2015’s red wine paper wafted of easy marks. Then the question papers were flipped and the faces fell: no points for spotting the wines as pinot noir at all. Bugger.
The question was instead about origins. Pinot is renowned for its transparency to “terroir influence” (i.e. its ability to vinously communicate soil, topography, weather and climate traits). Still, with every international winemaker with a hilly, foggy vineyard chasing that elusive “Burgundian” style and employing “Burgundian” winemaking techniques, identity is getting pretty muddy.
Terroir undoubtedly exists – sceptics need only fork over the increasingly vast sums commanded by even village-level Burgundy. Wines from the same producer, assuming they’re made identically, should through the subtlest slope or subsoil shift produce manifest differences even from plots mere bunny hops apart.
Sadly, as the world’s pinots improve, they just seem to get more like Burgundy (juicy, rich Central Otago and Russian River being staunch and much-appreciated exceptions). Thus at Altaya’s annual Passion for Pinot event, I probed: how can we hope to geo-locate pinot noir in a world of Burgundy lookalikes?