Pinot Gris

Pinot Gris and Pinot Grigio are the same grape, and the two names describe two philosophies that have almost nothing in common.

It is a colour mutation of Pinot Noir, and its skins are a dusty greyish-pink rather than green. How long the juice spends with them, and how ripe the fruit is picked, determines everything that follows.

The Italian approach picks early and presses immediately. The result is pale, light, crisp and deliberately neutral — green apple, lemon, a faint almond note — and its commercial success has been enormous. It is easy to be snobbish about it, but a well-made Pinot Grigio from Alto Adige or Friuli, where altitude and cooler sites give real definition, is a precise and useful wine.

The Alsace approach picks late and aims for the opposite. Pinot Gris there is full-bodied, rich, often barely off-dry, with baked apple, pear, honey, ginger and a smoky, almost bacon-like note that the region's growers regard as characteristic. Alcohol is high and acidity is low, and the wines age for a decade.

Germany makes both, calling the crisp version Grauburgunder and the richer, often sweeter one Ruländer.

A third route is skin contact, which produces the coppery Ramato style of north-east Italy — a reminder that the pale colour of most Pinot Grigio is a winemaking choice rather than a property of the grape.

Oregon has built a strong reputation with a style somewhere between the two poles: riper than Italy, drier and fresher than Alsace.

The name on the label is the most reliable single indicator of style, and it is a convention rather than a rule — producers choose which to use, and a few deliberately cross the wires. Pinot Grigio signals lean and crisp; Pinot Gris signals rich and textured.

The grape's pink skins are the reason it can produce wines of noticeably deeper colour than other whites even without deliberate skin contact, and why a slightly coppery tint in an Alsace Pinot Gris is normal rather than a fault.

In Alsace it is one of the four noble varieties permitted in grand cru vineyards, alongside Riesling, Gewurztraminer and Muscat, and the grand cru wines are among the most powerful dry whites in France — frequently fourteen per cent alcohol with a weight that has more in common with a red than with most whites. They also age for fifteen years or more, which very little Pinot Grigio does.