Pinot Noir is the wine that will, if you catch the right bottle, change what you thought wine was for. It is also the wine that has, more than any other grape on earth, been responsible for weeknights that ended earlier than they should have because the bottle was, technically, not that good. Both are true. Neither is contradiction. Welcome to the most misunderstood grape in the world.
Some context. Pinot Noir has been grown in Burgundy since roughly the fourth century, which is to say approximately the entire recorded history of any wine anyone drinks today. It is what serious wine people call a “temperamental” grape, which is what serious wine people say when they mean “a grape that will actively humiliate you.” Thin skin. Small berries. A vine that catches every disease ever named in a French agricultural manual. A picking window roughly four days long. Get it right and you have made a wine that people write books about. Get it wrong and you have made, essentially, a slightly darker Riesling (ok, ok, settle down). Growers call it the heartbreak grape, and they are not being poetic. They are being empirical.
Which brings us to 2004. Sideways hit theaters. Miles spent several minutes explaining why Pinot Noir was worth obsessing over…its thin skin, its fragility, its rewards. Then, in less than ten seconds, he managed to set Merlot back a generation. American sales of Pinot Noir jumped roughly fifteen percent within a year. Sales of Merlot dropped. The industry, watching this happen in real time, did what industries do. It planted more Pinot. A lot more. Everywhere it could, including places that had no business growing Pinot. What followed was, over the next decade, a flood of American Pinot of highly uneven quality, sold at prices from cheap to embarrassing, purchased by consumers who had been told by a fictional character they were now Pinot people. This is where the trouble started.
Get it wrong and you have made, essentially, a slightly darker Riesling.
Confession from one of us. This particular member of our team has spent most of their working life around Cabernet, which will surprise no reader of these dispatches, but had, at one point, a stretch of two years living in McMinnville, right in the middle of the Willamette Valley. If Burgundy is the benchmark, Oregon is the comparison everyone reaches for. The parallels are imperfect, as all comparisons are, but close enough that the conversation has been going on for decades. Pinot country up there is small. Everybody knows everybody. Winemakers are not, in fact, alone with their barrels. They trade fruit, they trade ideas, and they trade opinions about each other's fermentations, often while standing in one another's wineries on a Friday afternoon. They root, genuinely, for their neighbors’ wines to be as good as their own, because the region’s reputation rises together or it does not rise at all. This is not sentimentality. It is a working strategy. It also happens to be beautiful.
You need friends in Oregon in a way you do not always need them in California. The weather makes it so. It rains for what feels like most of the year, the light is grey more days than not, and when the sun does emerge, everyone briefly stops what they are doing to acknowledge it. Conversations tend to be long, in jeans and Blundstones, over something opened at four in the afternoon that will still, somehow, be open at ten. California, by contrast, is a fifty-five-degree Cabernet on a patio in a linen shirt, with people who mostly look like they know they are being photographed. Both are lovely. They are, however, very different rooms, and, we will come back to this, very different wines.
Which brings us to the part nobody in the wine trade particularly wants to say out loud. Many… a great many …of the most popular American Pinots you have ever bought, from bottles you would recognize at the grocery store, are technically sweet. Not dessert-wine sweet. Sweet in the way that the wine carries, quietly, six to ten grams of residual sugar per liter - enough to soften the tannins, round out the fruit, make it “accessible” on a Tuesday, and, not incidentally, make it more or less indistinguishable from every other wine in its category. This is not, we should say, an accident. It is a strategy. Sugar is the great equalizer of mediocre grapes. Pick your Pinot early, discover it did not develop the aromatics you had hoped for, leave it slightly sweet, and nobody at price point will complain. What they will notice is that they liked it. They will buy it again. They will call themselves Pinot people. They will, without knowing it, have never actually had Pinot.
There are, at the same time, producers making Pinot the way it is meant to be made, dry, precise, coaxed rather than manufactured, from cool sites where the grape actually wants to grow. Some of them are names you will have seen. In California: Williams Selyem, Kistler, Kosta Browne, Rhys, Failla, Aubert. In Oregon: Beaux Frères, Ken Wright, Domaine Serene, Antica Terra. Others, and this is where the more interesting drinking often lives, are producers most people have not yet found. In California: U.S. Grant, Ceritas, Sandhi, Littorai, Anthill Farms, Chanin, Peay. In Oregon: Cristom, Cameron, Brick House, Big Table Farm, St. Innocent, Belle Pente. All of them make Pinot at the level the grape deserves. All of them cost more than the sweetened proxies. All of them are, on any honest palate, unquestionably better. They are also harder to sell to a general consumer, because they do not have the sugar to smooth over their edges. They arrive with edges. Serious wine drinkers understand that the edges are the point. The rest of the market, not yet initiated, mistakes edges for flaws.
Which brings us, finally, to the point that Pinot people actually argue about at dinner. Pinot is wildly different depending on where it is grown, and the differences are not marketing, they are real. Willamette Pinot arrives with verve: bright, energetic, cool-nosed, lifted by acid, the kind of wine that enlightens a room slightly. California Pinot, broadly speaking (with every caveat about generalizing across an enormous region), is softer, richer, more generous, sometimes less complex, a wine that hugs before it argues. Burgundy sits somewhere in the middle at its best: a certain verve, a certain subtle nuance, all of it floating across the palate in a way that reads as refinement rather than performance. The region is broken into thousands of small parcels, each of them tasting somehow both slightly like the parcel next to it and completely different. This is why Burgundy has been driving serious wine drinkers mildly insane for four centuries.
The catch, and this is the real trouble with Pinot, is that all three of these styles arePinot…and depending on the mood you brought to the table, the wrong one is going to feel wrong. Too much verve when you wanted softness. Too much structure when you wanted sweetness. Too much sweetness when you wanted refinement. The lesson, which no bottle can quite tell you until you drink it, is that Pinot is not one thing. Find the region that speaks to you. Find the vintage that speaks to you. Find the producer who speaks to you. Then drink a lot of it. The scratch-your-head bottles are part of the tuition. The lovely ones are the reason we are all still, decades in, having this argument at dinner.
Vinly, in brief. We sell Pinot Noir. Some bottles are household names. Others are cult favorites known only to people who spend far too much time thinking about wine. What they share is that they taste like Pinot Noir, not a sweetened approximation of it. The wines you’ll find on Vinly have texture, tension, and personality. They aren’t polished into submission or engineered to appeal to everyone. They have edges and that’s precisely the point. If you’ve been drinking Pinot Noir for years and have occasionally wondered why so many bottles seemed just a little too ripe, a little too soft, or a little too agreeable, you’ve probably been noticing the difference all along. The best Pinot is the one that makes you slightly annoyed that you have been drinking the other kind.
— The Sesh Architect (currently opening something from the Willamette) vinlywine.com
NEXT DISPATCH · COMING MONDAY ( I hope)
“The other one.”
Next time we look at Chardonnay … Pinot’s sister grape in Burgundy, and the varietal that has been through an even more traumatic American reinvention. Butter. Oak. Malolactic. The small heresy that the best California Chardonnays taste more like white Burgundy than movie-theater popcorn. Bring an open mind. Bring a real glass. Bring the ability to admit you may have been served the wrong version for a very long time.
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