Pinot Noir

Pinot noir is the grape wine people fuss over more than any other. The reason is simple. It is a thin-skinned grape that ripens early, rots easily and changes its character from one hillside to the next. When it works, it makes a pale red wine with bright acidity, soft tannin and a smell of red fruit and flowers. That smell turns toward earth and mushroom as the wine ages. Because so little skin and tannin stand between you and the fruit, Pinot noir shows where it was grown more clearly than most red grapes do. That clarity is why growers chase it, and the fussiness is why so many of them fail.

This is the first lesson in the grapes unit. The tasting unit gave you the tools: acidity, tannin, body, finish, and the three families of aroma. From here on, each grape is described in those terms. Pinot noir comes first because it is the Willamette Valley's main grape, and the valley's story is largely the story of this one variety.

What Pinot noir is and why it is hard to grow

Start with what is in the glass. A typical Pinot noir is light to medium in color. It is often see-through at the rim, and a cherry or ruby red rather than purple-black. In the mouth it is dry, with medium to high acidity. Its tannin runs low to medium, and in a ripe year it is often fine-grained and silky rather than coarse. Its body is light to medium, and alcohol usually sits in the medium range. Young Pinot noir smells of red cherry, raspberry, strawberry and cranberry, sometimes plum in a warmer year, with rose, violet or hibiscus on top. Those are primary aromas, the ones from the grape itself. Winemaking adds its own layers. Oak can bring vanilla and spice, and whole clusters can bring tea and pepper. Given years in the bottle, the fruit dries out and the tertiary notes take over: forest floor, mushroom, leather and a savory quality people sometimes call earthy.

Every one of those traits traces back to the skin. Color and tannin in red wine come mostly from grape skins, and Pinot noir's skins are thin. Less skin means less pigment, so the wine is pale. It also means less tannin, so the wine has less grip. Compare Cabernet Sauvignon, a small, thick-skinned berry that gives dark, firmly gripping wine. Pinot noir's paleness is not a flaw or a sign of weak wine. It is what the grape is.

The acidity comes from timing. Pinot noir ripens early. That lets it reach full ripeness in cool places where a late grape would never ripen at all. In a cool place, the grape keeps more of its acid while it ripens, as the earlier lessons on acidity explained. So Pinot noir tends to be grown at the cool edge of where red grapes can ripen, and it tends to arrive in your glass with lively acidity.

Now the hard part, growing it. There are four main problems, and each comes from the same traits that make the wine attractive.

First, the thin skins split and rot. When rain falls near harvest, grapes swell and their skins crack. Mold, especially the gray rot called botrytis, moves in quickly. A thicker-skinned grape can shrug off a wet week that ruins Pinot noir.

Second, the bunches are tight. The name likely comes from the French word for pine, because a Pinot bunch is small and packed tight like a pine cone. Packed berries hold moisture against each other and give rot an easy path from one berry to the next.

Third, it buds early in spring. Budbreak is when the first green shoots push out of the dormant vine. An early-budding grape is exposed to spring frost for longer, and a hard frost on new shoots can cost a grower much of that year's crop.

Fourth, it mutates easily. Pinot noir is an old variety, and over centuries its vines have thrown off small genetic changes. Pinot gris and Pinot blanc are color mutations of the same grape: Pinot gris has grayish-pink skin, and Pinot blanc has white skin. Within Pinot noir itself, that instability produced hundreds of slightly different vines, and that brings us to clones.

A clone, in wine, is a line of vines grown from cuttings taken from one chosen mother vine. Grapevines are not usually grown from seed, because seedlings do not come out like their parents. Growers take a cutting, a piece of cane, and root it, so every new vine is a genetic copy of the original. When a grower or a nursery picks out a vine with a useful trait, they propagate it, and that becomes a clone. The trait might be smaller berries, looser bunches, earlier ripening or better resistance to rot. Every clone is still Pinot noir. The differences are like those between siblings, not between species.

Two clone names come up again and again on Oregon labels and technical sheets. The first is Pommard, named after the Burgundy village it is traced to. It is often described as giving darker fruit, more structure and a firmer core. The second group is the Dijon clones, a set selected in Burgundy and identified by numbers, such as 115, 667 and 777. They are often described as brighter and more aromatic, with forward red fruit and perfume. Take those descriptions as what the styles typically show, said by growers and writers over many years. They are not laws. Site, vintage and winemaking can easily outweigh the clone. A third name, Wädenswil, is an older Swiss selection and was one of the clones planted in Oregon's early years. Many winemakers plant several clones and blend them, because each adds a different layer.

Where does Pinot noir grow well? Its home is Burgundy, in eastern France. There, in a narrow strip of slopes called the Côte d'Or, it makes the reds that set the world's idea of what the grape can be. It is also one of the three main grapes of Champagne, where it goes into sparkling wine, a use that comes up in a later lesson. Outside France, the cool places matter most. In the United States, they are the Willamette Valley and the cooler parts of California, such as the Sonoma Coast, the Russian River Valley and the Santa Rita Hills in Santa Barbara County, where fog and ocean wind keep things cool. New Zealand grows a great deal of it, especially in Central Otago and Marlborough. Germany grows it as well, under the name Spätburgunder, and its warming climate has made German Pinot noir more serious in recent decades. The pattern is the same in every case: Pinot noir does best where the growing season is long and cool, not hot.

What does an ordinary bottle show? Here the grape's fussiness reaches your wallet. Because Pinot noir is costly and risky to grow, very cheap Pinot noir is often made to taste like something else. Many inexpensive bottles from warm regions are dark and jammy, a little sweet, with low acidity and a lot of oak flavor. That can come from very ripe fruit, a little residual sugar, or blending. American federal rules let a wine named for one grape include a share of other grapes, so part of a cheap Pinot noir may be something darker. Oregon is stricter, and the labels lesson takes that up. A plain, honest everyday Pinot noir from a cool region looks and tastes different. It is light in color, you can see through it, it has lively acid that makes your mouth water, and its fruit is red rather than black. If a supermarket Pinot noir is nearly opaque and tastes of blackberry jam, its label is probably telling you less than the whole story.

If you want to try this, here is an optional comparison. Pour a small glass of an everyday Pinot noir from a cool region next to a darker red, such as an inexpensive Cabernet Sauvignon or Malbec. Tilt both glasses over a white sheet of paper. The Pinot noir should be paler and more see-through at the rim. Then taste both, or just sip and spit. The Pinot noir should feel less drying on your gums after you swallow, which is the lower tannin. It should also make your mouth water more, which is the higher acid. If you skip this, nothing that follows depends on it.

How the Willamette Valley built its name on Pinot noir

The Willamette Valley's link to Pinot noir begins in the mid-1960s, when almost no one thought fine red wine could come from Oregon. The conventional advice at the time held that the state was too cool and too wet for wine grapes. A handful of young growers disagreed. Among the first was David Lett, who had studied winemaking in California, believed Pinot noir needed a cool climate, and planted it in the red hills above the town of Dundee, in what is now the Dundee Hills. His winery was The Eyrie Vineyards. Others planted in the same years and soon after, in the hills around Dundee, Newberg and Amity. Few of them had much money or experience. They were betting on climate.

That bet was the right one, though it was often explained the wrong way. You will still hear that the valley shares Burgundy's latitude. It does not. The forty-fifth parallel runs through the Willamette Valley, which puts the valley at roughly the latitude of Bordeaux. Burgundy lies one to three degrees farther north. What the valley shares with Burgundy is a cool climate: a growing season cool enough for an early grape like Pinot noir to ripen slowly and hold its acid. The first growers were right about the climate. The latitude line is a myth that grew up later.

The world's attention came through two tastings in France around 1979 and 1980. In the first, a French food and wine guide held a large international competition, and an Eyrie Pinot noir from the 1975 vintage finished among the top wines in the Pinot noir category, against well-known Burgundies. Robert Drouhin, head of the Burgundy house Maison Joseph Drouhin, then arranged a second tasting in Burgundy. The Eyrie wine again finished near the top, close behind one of Drouhin's own Burgundies. You will see the exact placings told differently in different places, so the safe version is that it finished among the very top, twice, against Burgundy. The point did not depend on the exact rank. A wine from a valley most people had never heard of stood beside the benchmark and held its own, and wine writers took notice of Oregon.

What followed was investment from Burgundy itself. In the late 1980s, the Drouhin family bought land in the Dundee Hills and founded Domaine Drouhin Oregon. For a famous Burgundy house to plant in Oregon was a signal the rest of the wine world could read: people who knew Pinot noir well thought this valley was worth the money. Other Burgundian producers and investors followed in later decades, along with a growing number of American wineries. Over the following decades, the valley went from a few dozen experimenters to hundreds of wineries, and Willamette Pinot noir became a recognized style on wine lists far from Oregon.

That style connects back to what the first half of this lesson explained. Willamette Pinot noir tends to be moderate in alcohol, with producers commonly reporting thirteen to fourteen percent, fresh in acid and red-fruited when young. Cooler vintages lean lighter and more tart, and warmer vintages lean darker and fuller. As the earlier lessons showed, it ages toward forest floor, mushroom and cedar while its acidity keeps it lively. The early planters chose hillsides partly to escape frost and the wet valley floor, which are two of the grape's four problems. The cool climate that worried the skeptics turned out to be what the grape needed. The rain that worries growers is still a real risk, which is why a dry September matters so much in the valley.

The clones arrived with the history. Early Oregon plantings leaned on Pommard and Wädenswil. The Dijon clones came into wide use in the valley later, from the late 1980s and 1990s on, and growers often credit them with adding brighter aromatics and earlier ripening to the mix. Today many Willamette Pinot noirs are blends of several clones. Others are bottled from a single clone and a single site, which is the clearest way to hear what each one adds.

One grape from two sites at Ricochet

The show's home winery puts this lesson into two bottles. Ricochet Wine Co., the small McMinnville winery the course is taught through, owns no vineyards. It buys its grapes from growers it names, so its single-vineyard Pinot noirs come from other people's rows, which Ricochet calls sustainably farmed. That makes the grower relationship central: a winery that buys its grapes generally agrees to buy fruit from a grower, then makes the cellar choices once the grapes come in.

The first wine is the 2022 Holmes Gap Pinot noir. By Ricochet's account, it is made entirely from the Pommard clone, grown at Holmes Gap Vineyard in the Van Duzer Corridor, the appellation shaped by cool ocean wind pouring through a gap in the Coast Range. About thirty percent of the grapes went in as whole clusters, fermentation used native yeast, and the wine spent eleven months in French oak, a quarter of it new. So this is a single clone from a single windy site. If the usual description of Pommard holds, that is the clone to look to for darker fruit and a firmer core, with a cool, windy site keeping the acidity bright.

The second is the 2022 Eola Springs Pinot noir, from Eola Springs Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills, a different grower in a different appellation. Ricochet lists different clones here, Swan and Calera, both selections that trace back to California, and a different approach. It was fermented as whole clusters, spent twenty-one days on its skins with native yeast, saw some new oak, and was bottled from free-run wine only, the wine that drains off the skins before they are pressed. Same grape, same vintage, same winemaker. The clones, the site and the stem treatment change.

Decanter noticed both. It scored the 2022 Eola Springs ninety-five points and the 2022 Holmes Gap ninety-four, which is the magazine's judgment of those two wines. For this lesson, the scores matter less than the pairing. Two Pinot noirs that differ mainly in clone and place are the most direct way to test what you just learned, that Pinot noir shows where it was grown. A third bottle helps too: Ricochet's Willamette Valley Pinot noir, which in 2021 and 2022 blended four vineyards and the Pommard, Wädenswil and Dijon clones, shows the other approach, clones combined rather than separated.

If you would like to put this to work, visit Ricochet in McMinnville, a winery that belongs to a friend of the show, and book through ricochetwine.com. With small pours and a spittoon, or a designated driver, set the 2022 Holmes Gap beside the 2022 Eola Springs, tilt both over something white, and compare their color first. Then check which one makes your mouth water more and which leans toward red fruit and which toward something darker or earthier, and write down one line on each before you read anyone else's notes.