Wine and Spirit

This noble red variety from France's Burgundy region makes an intensely flavored, complex, high-acid wine with incredible longevity.

The warmer the climate it's grown in, the riper and more obvious the fruit, and the acid softens a bit.

Even in this riper, fruit-forward style the wine will not overpower your meal.

Pinot noir is called the most sensuous of wines because of its enticing, sometimes earthy perfume and soft, round, silky, but still structured texture.

Much of what is considered the best champagne is pinot noir dominated, as are many New Zealand sparkling wines.

Outside France, New Zealand and California have had tremendous success with this variety, though the style is much more fruit-forward as can be expected with warmer climates.

The key for these New World producers is researching and experimenting to find the cooler microclimates such as Central Otago in New Zealand, or those with extended growing seasons due to coastal fog, such as in the California regions of Santa Barbara (South Central Coast), Santa Lucia Highlands (Monterey County), Carneros, Russian River Valley (Sonoma County), and Medocino County.

Pinot noir is at its most enviable in its various interpretations as red Burgundy.

From the perfumed, silky, delicate Chambolle-Musigny to exotic Richebourg, pinot noirs from this stretch of golden hills of France (from the Cote de Nuits in the northern half of the Cote d'Or, the heart of Burgundy) are the role models for the world.

No other grape delivers a wine with such heady perfume, silky texture, and primal, earthy flavour.

Generally the wines of Burgundy are light to medium bodied.

They are also light in colour - one of the lightest red wines in the world is aged Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) - so the praising of dark, inky colour as a sign of quality certainly does not apply here.

If a pinot noir is dark and inky, most likely it has been blended with another variety to achive this popular, trendy characteristic.

Bollinger and other well-known champagnes are other exquisite interpretations of pinot noir, all raspberry and lace.

New Zealand produces brilliant, acid-balanced versions, as do producers such as Coldstream Hills in Victoria's Yarra Valley, Australia.

In the USA, styles include fruity, juicy, and bright versions from Oregon (Willamette Valley), Medocino County, Russion River Valley, and Carneros. Fuller, rounder, deeper styles in Monterey, especially from Gary Pisoni of Gary's Vineyards, and some of the longes-lived and exotic versions from Santa Barbara.

Pinot noir has a reputation among grape-growers as one of the fussiest grape varieties to manage, and can give unpredictable results in the cellar, while aging, and in the bottle.

Pinot noir wines are associated with the following terms:

- cranberry

- cherry

- bing cherry

- morello cherry

- raspberry

- blackberry

- stewed tomato

- earth

- leaf

- mineral

- smoke

- game

- sauvage

- forest floor

- floral

- oak