The First Annual Great Pinot Noir Tasting

Dering Harbor, Shelter Island

WE’VE ALL SEEN SIDEWAYS. PINOT NOIR IS COOL. YEAH, WE GET IT. OR DO WE?

By Susan Whitney Simm

Get a dozen savvy food and wine people together to taste and discuss Pinot Noir and you are guaranteed one thing: no one will agree. Front-and-center in popular wine culture since the movie Sideways, Pinot Noir is now much more present in our collective consciousness. But that doesn’t mean it is really understood, as the results of the tasting illustrate.

On a wintry Wednesday in late January my husband David and I gathered together friends in the food and wine industry at the Onshore Restaurant in Shelter Island’s Dering Harbor. We painstakingly assembled a list of twelve Pinots that included many hard-to-find selections from around the world, including local wines and French Burgundies, and tasted them completely blind (see results in box on the opposite page).

Not so long ago, Pinot Noir was grown almost exclusively in Burgundy, where it is named for the region as opposed to the grape. Hence the tendency, especially among Burgundy lovers, to compare all newcomers to it. In France, Pinot Noir is lighter in color and body than Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot. If grapes were couture designers, Pinot Noir would be John Galliano, quirky but brilliant, compared to Cabernet’s Versace. Old World Pinot in the Cote D’ Or’s Grand Cru vineyards is famous for wonderful complexity and elegance rivaling that found in the finest Bordeaux.

But Pinot Noir is also infamous for being finicky. It is very easily affected by soil and climate changes. Even though Pinot thrives on the gravelly hillsides of Burgundy, quality can be all over the place, even among the more respected producers.

Unlike the past, today Pinot growers in the New World have met with great success in places such as Oregon’s Willamette Valley, California’s Santa Rita Highlands, Chile’s Casablanca Valley and New Zealand’s Central Otago.

The wines in the tasting included both New World and Old World Pinot Noirs. Both are Pinots, but only one is Burgundy. The staunch Burgundy aficionados among us dismissed the New World wines as being too hot and too high in alcohol to compliment food. “Pour it down the drain!” exclaimed one particularly passionate taster. These wines are indeed riper, more tannic and higher in alcohol, or “big,” as a result of the warmer climates they are grown in. There is currently great demand for this style, but it is not to everyone’s taste.

“Pinot Noir often loses its pizzazz in hot years,” writes Burgundy expert and importer Kermit Lynch in Inspiring Thirst. “It is a grape that can make a dull, vulgar wine in hot climates. Centuries of experience proved to the ancients that Burgundy’s ripening season and soil are perfect for Pinot Noir. But of course they were not looking for blockbusters.”

Big wines often do well at blind tastings as palate fatigue is inevitable for most of us after ten or so wines. But despite votes for the closest thing we served to “blockbuster” wines – a 2004 Pisoni Estate from Santa Lucia California and a 2004 Alazan from Chile – our group clearly favored the Old World. The favorite at the tasting was a fairly inexpensive 2002 Chassange-Montrachet from Blain Gagnard, a medium-bodied red Burgundy from a Domaine much more famous for its whites. It is a personal favorite of mine and I am pleased that it was popular, though I am surprised that the far pricier 2002 Grand Cru LeRoy Clos de Vougoets scored nearly last.

But the biggest news is that two wines from New York State – one from the Niagara Escarpment (2005 Warm Lake) and one from Long Island (2004 Jamesport Pinot Noir) – came in second and third, respectively. This is surprising considering the East End is not well-suited to growing and ripening Pinot Noir.

“Two of the New York State wines were not only a surprise but would land on the list of wines I’d personally buy,” said wine consultant Chris Miller, referring to the 2005 Warm Lake from Niagara Escarpment and the 2002 Castello di Borghese.

At the end of the tasting, after the “aha!” moment when the identities of the wines were revealed, the conversation kept coming back to a particularly modern conundrum regarding Pinot Noir: should Pinot Noir grown in emerging wine regions of the world be judged against the great Burgundies of France? Or should we compare wines within a region instead of comparing grape varietals globally?

I think that comparing wines within a region is the answer. Comparing grape varietals from disparate regions doesn’t work, especially when it comes to Pinot Noir, because the flavors, aromas and complexity of Pinot are so tied to what the French call “terrior” that Pinots grown in California under ideal conditions (or any other warm climate region) cannot and will not taste anything like a Pinot grown in rocky-soiled, weather-challenged Burgundy. In a future tasting I would include only Burgundies or only Pinots from a specific region.

In conclusion I must say that for those of us who love, for better or worse, old-style Pinot Noir, there seems to be little danger of Burgundy capitulating to modern trends any time soon. But I am pleasantly surprised to find, along with some of our wine enthusiast friends, that some very respectable Pinots are being made outside of those hallowed Domaines, sometimes in far-flung places.

Susan Whitney Simm is Dan's Wine Guide editor. Email ssimm@optonline.net