US National Pinot Noir Day
<p>On 22 February 1965, a young Californian named David Lett pushed three thousand grafted vines into the soil of Oregon’s Willamette Valley, against the advice of nearly everyone in the wine establishment, who told him Pinot Noir would never ripen that far north. He was wrong about almost nothing. Within a decade his Eyrie Vineyards Pinot was startling French tasters, and Lett had earned the nickname “Papa Pinot.” National Pinot Noir Day, observed each 18 August, celebrates the grape that drove him to such stubbornness: the famously difficult, famously rewarding variety that has broken and made the careers of growers from Burgundy to the American West.</p>
<h2 id="the-heartbreak-grape">The heartbreak grape</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>Pinot Noir’s reputation rests on a paradox: it is one of the hardest grapes in the world to grow well, and that is exactly why people love it. The vine is thin-skinned and tight-clustered, which leaves it prone to rot, mildew and frost; it ripens early and unevenly; and it is exquisitely sensitive to where it is planted, expressing tiny differences in soil and slope that coarser grapes would shrug off. Growers speak of it with a mixture of devotion and despair, and the trade nickname “heartbreak grape” is entirely earned. The reward for all that anxiety is a wine of pale-to-medium ruby colour, perfumed aroma and silky texture, prized for finesse rather than power, and capable, at its best, of an almost uncanny ability to taste of its own particular hillside.</p>
<h2 id="a-history-written-by-monks-and-dukes">A history written by monks and dukes</h2>
<p>Pinot Noir is genuinely ancient. The Romans are believed to have cultivated a remarkably similar dark grape in what is now Burgundy by the first century AD, and the variety has grown there, in some form, for the better part of two thousand years. Its name nods to its appearance: the tight, pine-cone shape of its bunches, “pin” for pine, and “noir” for the dark skin.</p>
<p>The grape’s character, though, was forged in the Middle Ages by the Cistercian monks of the abbey of Cîteaux, founded in 1098 in the Côte d’Or. Across the following centuries of patient, almost obsessive observation, they mapped the vineyards of Burgundy plot by plot, recording which hillsides, sometimes only metres apart, reliably produced the finest wine, and walling off the best of them into the enclosed <em>clos</em> that still bear their names, the Clos de Vougeot among them. In doing so they effectively discovered the idea of terroir, the conviction that place is tasteable, which remains the philosophical heart of fine wine to this day. The Dukes of Burgundy then championed the grape commercially; in 1395 Duke Philip the Bold went so far as to ban the higher-yielding but coarser Gamay from the best slopes, calling it a “very bad and disloyal plant” and decreeing that Burgundy’s reputation would rest on Pinot Noir alone. By the fourteenth century it was, and has remained, the red grape of Burgundy.</p>
<p>The name “Pinot Noir” itself only settled into general use much later; for most of its history the grape was known by a scatter of local synonyms, and even today it travels under names such as Spätburgunder in Germany and Blauburgunder in Austria and northern Italy. What did not change was its association with a narrow band of cool, marginal climates. Pinot Noir cannot abide real heat: pushed into a warm region it loses the acidity and perfume that justify the trouble of growing it, turning flat and jammy. This is why its serious homes are almost all places that flirt with being too cold to ripen grapes at all, and why every successful new region has effectively been an argument about latitude, altitude and the reach of the ocean’s cooling breath.</p>
<h2 id="the-grape-that-made-the-others">The grape that made the others</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>Part of what makes Pinot Noir so significant is genetic. It is one of the most mutation-prone grapes known, sometimes called a “mutational sink,” and its colour mutations gave rise directly to Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc, which share its DNA exactly. More astonishingly, modern DNA analysis has shown that Pinot, crossed at various times with an old and now-obscure white grape called Gouais Blanc, is a parent of at least sixteen, by some counts more than twenty, other varieties, among them Chardonnay, Gamay and Aligoté. Pinot Meunier, the third grape of Champagne, turns out to be a chimeric mutant of Pinot itself. The world’s most famous grape, in other words, is also one of its most prolific ancestors.</p>
<h2 id="oregon-stakes-its-claim">Oregon stakes its claim</h2>
<p>David Lett’s gamble in the Willamette Valley took years to vindicate, and when the vindication came it arrived from the most unexpected quarter imaginable: a Paris tasting room. In 1979 the French food and wine magazine <em>Gault-Millau</em> staged a “Wine Olympiad,” pitting some 330 wines from 33 countries against one another, judged blind by a panel of more than sixty tasters. Lett’s 1975 Eyrie Vineyards South Block Reserve Pinot Noir placed in the top ten, an outcome so embarrassing to the Burgundians that the négociant house of Joseph Drouhin demanded a rematch the following year, restricting the field to the finest French and Oregon Pinots. The Eyrie wine finished a hair behind one of Drouhin’s own grands crus, separated by a sliver of a point. The result was no fluke, and Robert Drouhin understood it instantly; in 1987 his family bought land in the Dundee Hills and founded Domaine Drouhin Oregon, an extraordinary vote of confidence from one of Burgundy’s grandest names. The grape that “would never ripen that far north” had quietly conquered a corner of the Pacific Northwest, and the modern American Pinot scene, from the Sonoma Coast to the Anderson Valley, grew in the space that Lett’s stubbornness had opened.</p>
<h2 id="why-the-day-matters">Why the day matters</h2>
<p>The case for celebrating Pinot Noir is partly a case for celebrating difficulty. In an age of reliable, technically flawless, sometimes interchangeable wines, the grape stands for risk and variation, for the idea that the most rewarding things are the hardest to get right. A dedicated day gives the curious an excuse to taste across regions and discover, often with surprise, how radically the same grape can change from one to the next: the savoury, earthy, mineral expressions of cooler sites against the brighter, riper fruit of warmer ones.</p>
<p>The day also serves a quietly democratic purpose. Pinot Noir can seem the preserve of experts, hedged about with jargon and price tags, and an observance built on tasting and conversation lowers that barrier. Its relatively light body and bright acidity also make it one of the most food-friendly reds, happy alongside dishes that would overwhelm a heavier wine, which makes it a generous grape to learn on.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated-and-the-sideways-effect">How it is celebrated, and the Sideways effect</h2>
<p>Wineries and wine bars mark 18 August with tastings, flights and cellar-door events, often inviting drinkers to compare Burgundian and New World bottles side by side. A typical flight might run from a savoury Côte de Nuits village wine through a New Zealand Central Otago bottling all the way to a ripe Californian example, the point being to feel the grape stretch across climates while staying recognisably itself. Restaurants build pairing menus around the grape, leaning on that food-friendliness; the classic Burgundian match is coq au vin or a dish of mushrooms, since Pinot’s earthy, undergrowth notes and the funk of fungi were practically made for one another, but it sits as happily beside roast duck, grilled salmon or a wedge of soft, washed-rind cheese. No discussion of how Pinot Noir came to be celebrated, though, can skip the strangest chapter in its modern story. In October 2004 the film <em>Sideways</em>, whose wine-obsessed protagonist rhapsodises about Pinot Noir while loudly disdaining Merlot, was released, and the market responded with almost comic obedience. In the months that followed, Pinot Noir sales surged while Merlot dipped, and Californian Pinot production climbed steeply over the following years. A single fictional rant reshaped what an entire country chose to drink, a reminder that even an ancient grape’s fortunes can turn on a screenplay.</p>
<h2 id="tradition-romance-and-the-company-it-keeps">Tradition, romance and the company it keeps</h2>
<p>For its admirers, Pinot Noir represents a particular philosophy: that subtlety outranks force, and that patience is rewarded. There is real romance to it, born of its difficulty and its capacity for greatness, and raising a glass is, in a small way, an acknowledgement of the care and risk that went into it. As a wine for the table, it belongs to a wider calendar of culinary pleasures meant to be lingered over, sitting easily alongside the green-flecked conviviality of <a href="/specialdate/us-national-guacamole-day/">Guacamole Day</a> at the start of a meal and the rich, slow indulgences of dessert, the frozen layers of <a href="/specialdate/us-national-spumoni-day/">Spumoni Day</a> and the silken depth of <a href="/specialdate/us-national-pots-de-creme-day/">pots de crème</a>, with which a fine Pinot is more than happy to keep company.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>Pinot Noir is so prone to mutation it is nicknamed a “mutational sink”; Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc are its colour mutations and share its exact DNA.</li>
<li>Crossed with the obscure grape Gouais Blanc, Pinot is a parent of Chardonnay, Gamay, Aligoté and more than a dozen other varieties.</li>
<li>In 1395, Duke Philip the Bold banned the rival Gamay grape from Burgundy’s best slopes to protect Pinot Noir’s reputation.</li>
<li>Oregon’s Pinot industry began with three thousand vines that David Lett, “Papa Pinot,” planted in 1965 despite being told the grape would never ripen there.</li>
<li>The 2004 film <em>Sideways</em> measurably boosted Pinot Noir sales while denting Merlot’s, an unusually direct case of cinema moving a market.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>There is a kind of honesty in a grape that refuses to be easy. Pinot Noir does not forgive carelessness or reward shortcuts; it insists that the grower pay attention to the specific patch of earth in front of them, which is perhaps why the people who fall for it tend to fall hard. The monks of Cîteaux understood this seven centuries ago when they knelt in the dirt cataloguing one slope against the next, and David Lett understood it when he ignored every expert and planted anyway. To drink Pinot Noir thoughtfully is to taste not just a place but the stubbornness of the people who believed in it, which is a richer thing to find in a glass than mere pleasure.</p>
Advertisement
Related Content
Advertisement
