Bob Campbell is one of only 264 Masters of Wine in the world. An international wine judge, Bob judges wine professionally in ten countries and contributes regularly to publications around the world. His specialty is New Zealand wine which he reviews from an international perspective.
Gris? Grigio? A Pinot by any other name would taste as sweet.
Friday, August 13th, 2010
Bilancia, a small but perfectly formed Hawke’s Bay winemaker, sent me a vertical selection of Pinot Gris/Pinot Grigio (the wine morphed from one brand to the other in 2006 without any significant change in stylistic direction) to demonstrate how well the wine responds to a little bottle age.
A tasting of the six wines proved their point. After nearly six years in bottle the 2004 vintage still looked pretty good (thanks to screwcap closures) although I must confess that I slightly favoured the fresher primary fruit flavours of the more youthful vintages (all are reviewed in my wine notes).
The tasting did raise the interesting style distinction between Pinot Grigio and Pinot Gris. The Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) recently conducted some interesting research after T’Gallant, a notable Australian Pinot Gris maker, asked if they could develop a scientific method of distinguishing between the Pinot Grigio and Pinot Gris styles.
Peter Godden, the man in charge of the research explained that they purchased a number of French Pinot Gris and Italian Pinot Grigio samples and set to work with a focus group to define the style. If I correctly recall our lengthy conversation on the subject the two styles were broadly defines as follows:
Pinot Gris: Richer, fleshier and more flavoursome, often with some sweetness balanced by fine tannins. These wines were probably picked from riper grapes and allowed to retain a modicum of residual sugar while still reaching reasonably high alcohol levels. Skin contact extracted tannins (and flavour) helping to balance the residual sugar.
Pinot Grigio: Lighter, drier, less flavour, fresher acidity and a more delicate texture with little evidence of tannins.
The researchers drew a scale of zero to ten points with a pure Pinot Grigio representing 0 and pure Pinot Gris (if either ideal in fact exists) as 10 on the scale. They plotted each of the wines tasted somewhere on the scale. I recall asking Godden of he preferred Pinot Grigio or Pinot Gris. He answered that his ideal wine was aroung 3.5 .
They even programmed a rather clever machine to define Pinot Grigio-ness or Pinot Gris-ness by passing a light beam through an unopened bottle and analysing the result by computer. During their study they came across a winemaker who has bottled all his Pinot Gris on a single day but stored the resulting wine in two warehouses at slightly different temperatures. The machine was so finely-tuned it could determine which warehouse with unerring accuracy.
In this country almost all wine made from the Pinot Gris grape is described as “Pinot Gris” (rather than Pinot Grigio). The reason for that is simple. Pinot Gris has a higher perceived value to the consumer. Histocrically demand for Pinot Gris has exceeded supply so why discount the price by labelling a wine as Pinot Grigio?
However there are signs that supply may now have caught up to, even exceeded, demand. Expect to see a growing number of New Zealand wines labelled as Pinot Grigio – a brand extension which might delay a surplus of this popular grape variety.
