What makes a good pinot

A vibrant and delightful wine, expect delicate aromas of gingerbread spices with smooth tannins and bright acidity. This delicious and textured wine from Gevrey-Chambertin shows flavors of dried strawberries, cedar, potpourri, and a touch of smoke. Leroux sources his fruit from four separate lieux-dits within the village. Bright acid and elegant tannins ensure that this wine will taste delicious now, but will definitely soar to a new level within the next years.

A well-balanced Pinot Noir should entice you aromatically, enter gracefully onto your palate, and leave a long, beautiful finish. Like Mark Tarlov who just recently left us used to say, Pinot Noir is like a ballerina. The dedication, muscle, practice, and form are all there, but the audience only sees a lovely display and performance.

Pinot Noir is the same way. Under all of the meticulous layers that winegrowers and winemakers hammer out, our consumer is left with a lacy, transformative wine experience. Expect flavors of cherry, raspberry, sandalwood, and spice, along with crisp acidity and a lasting finish. Operating out of Napa Valley, Domaine Carneros' founding winemaker Eileen Crane is best known for her landmark sparkling wines. Still, pinot noir is another trick up her sleeve.

Whole berries for this pinot are cold-soaked for delicate flavor extraction, then barrel-aged for 10 months. Intense and full-bodied with luscious tannins, this wine has notes of cherry, strawberry, chocolate, pomegranate, and plum.

It's sweet and juicy with brilliant texture and a long finish. The pinot is great on its own or as a companion to New York strip steak, herb-dusted pork loin, or parmesan-crusted, pan-seared Dover sole. This smooth, dark-fruited pinot has aromas of black and red cherry, earth, and undertones of spicy pepper. Smooth tannins form the base of a floral-accented pinot reminiscent of violets and lavender, tinged with rich vanilla, cherry, and cedar spices.

Also, if you like a Sancerre producer, odds are they also make Pinot Noir. Founded by Wellington native Michael Seresin, this eponymous New Zealand domaine focuses on organic and biodynamic farming, hand-picked fruit, and gentle winemaking.

After spending much of his early life in Italy—and falling in love with its food and wine culture—Seresin returned to his native New Zealand, settled in Marlborough, and established his winery in The majority of the fruit for this wine comes from clay-rich soils in the Omaka Valley and was hand-picked, destemmed, and macerated prior to native yeast fermentation. After 11 months of aging in neutral French oak, the wine was bottled unfined and unfiltered. Energetic flavors of ripe wild berries, plums, and black tea harmoniously weave together on the palate and lead to spicy, mouth-filling finish.

Representing a taste of France with great zeal, Patrice Rion is an expert winemaker, finely tuned to growing and harvesting grapes on his vineyards in Nuits-St-Georges.

You can taste his decades of expertise with this delicious wine. The balance comes from mineral tones like flint or riverstones. Wines from Oregon tend to be quite peppery with firm tannins, loamy minerality, and bursts of bright cherry. Burgundy, France was the original birthplace of Pinot Noir. So, it should come as no surprise that some of the best Pinot Noir wines still come from this region.

These wines age particularly well. They have more earthy tones than Pinots from other regions. Think mushrooms, dried herbs, and flinty minerals. They also have a pleasant floral aroma and vivid red fruit flavors. If you are looking for an affordable and fruit forward Pinot variety, you might try a Pinot Noir from New Zealand or Australia. You can even find some sparkling Pinot Noir wines to your taste! Wines from these regions tend to be more zesty and acidic, with notes of sensuous red fruits and toasted sugar.

While you will get the usual berry flavors from a Chilean Pinot, you may even detect notes of leather, dark chocolate, and beetroot as well as a hint of bitterness in your wine. As you can see, the region can greatly affect the end result in your glass.

With such diversity in taste, you may think it difficult to pair with food. In truth, the diverse Pinot Noir tasting notes make his wine is one of the most versatile and food-friendly. To bring out the very best Pinot Noir wine flavors, these are the pairings we recommend:. While you may have heard that fish is best paired with white wine, a fruit-forward Pinot Noir is actually a perfect match for salmon or tuna.

These fruity Pinots also pair particularly well with roasted chicken or pasta dishes. If there is a hint of spice or sweetness to your fruity Pinot Noir wine, try drinking it with grilled quail, roasted beets, Chinese duck pancakes , or any dishes with cherries and figs — which will beautifully highlight the fruit notes in your red wine.

Bold Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley can stand up to stronger, meatier flavors than other varieties. From a breathtaking coastal vineyard planted next to a Redwood grove, comes an equally breathtaking Pinot Noir.

The chilly climes of Seascape Vineyard often push ripening all the way back to November, preserving mouthwatering acidity and adding depth. This is full of generous red and black fruits, savory herbs, silky tannins, and the unique imprint of this impressive terroir. Seeing the potential for Anderson Valley, Duckhorn founders Dan and Margaret Duckhorn broke into the region as far back as Since then, their Anderson Valley Pinots have become quintessential California expressions of the grape.

This Gowan Creek release is rich and giving, overflowing with blueberry, black cherry and ripe plum, balanced by vibrant acidity and freshness. Smoke and oak complement the juicy fruit, while velvety tannins provide structure. But Mount Eden, founded in , precedes the boom before the wave before the seed that grew into the California wine industry as we know it today. In other words, this is an original.

The estate Pinot is similarly classic, offering dense, dark fruits, layered alongside herbs, cinnamon and earth. It's plush, velvety and mouthwatering, with a long, long finish. Put them together and the results are predictably awesome. Grown from Bien Nacido's Block 8—planted at an elevation of 1, feet—this vibrant Pinot bursts with black cherry and strawberry compote, complemented by charcoal earth, and firm, ageworthy tannins.

Winds from the Van Duzer corridor treat Pinot grapes to cool, refreshing breezes, keeping pests at bay, and helping with fresh acid retention. Mayasara has caught the critics attention, been a NYT favorite, and this Momtazi Vineyard Pinot is strutting in its prime, showing lovely earthy and black truffle notes, dried purple florals, and black currants on a tart cherry finish marked by cigar box spice.

Burgundy expert Jasper Morris MW has called Denis Mortet "a colossal figure," whose wines "punch far above their weight. Tart red cherry notes mingle with a salty minerality tinged with sweet tobacco, cedar, and chocolaty tannins.

Although we mostly think of white Sancerre, made from Sauvignon Blanc grapes, a handful of producers harvest Pinot Noir here in the Loire Valley, turning our some truly dazzling renditions of this fickle grape. Lucien Crochet is one of the top producers, and this red Sancerre offers a panoply of juicy black plum, and dark cherry notes with sumptuous deep earth character, truffle and wild dried savory herbs underscored by structure tannins.

At the southern end of New Zealand's North Island, in the Wairarapa Wellingtong Wine Country region, the Pinots from just around the town of Martinborough are fast becoming critical darlings. The area shares similarities to Marlborough—ample sunshine, cool nights, rocky, well-draining soils—making it a hotbed for Point, but there's something terrifically refined about the Pinots from here.

They're perhaps less flashy and opulent as those from Marlborough, and Escarpment's founder, Larry McKenna, is a pioneer of the region. The grapes for Te Rehua are hand-harvested, fermented with indigenous yeasts, gentle pressing into partial new French oak barriques for 18 months, bottled unfiltered, giving way to a mouth-filling and firmly structured wine, layered with creamy black cherry, sandalwood, wild sage, and cracked pepper. Fans of Cloudy Bay wines are in for a treat.

Viticulturist Ivan Sutherland and enologist James Healy are two Cloudy Bay alumnus, having helped elevate the brand to one of New Zealand's best-known wineries. In , they set out on their own and the partnership resulted in Dog Point. Expressive aromas of ripe red and black fruits, forest floor, clove, and sweet spice. Full and ripe, bursting with rich black cherry and black raspberry fruit, fleshy plum, and tinged with new wood cedar, crushed violets and cracked pepper.

Central Otago is the world's southernmost wine region unless someone planted grapes on Antarctica and forgot to tell the world and in the s was a haven for gold-rush hopefuls. Today, the vines are the region's golden nuggets, planted against a backdrop of snow-covered mountains. Ice age glaciers and centuries of wind have left layers of loess, which drains easily, making for fragrant and perfumed Pinot Noirs with a lush and silky texture.

Felton Road regular earns high scores from critics, and this "Block 3" reveals a decadent mix of dark red berry fruit, bramble, and wild red florals tinged with orange peel and milk chocolate notes. Rich and mineral-driven, worth every penny. Jump into a Google image search and it's easy to see why. Cooling breezes off the Atlantic keep this area far cooler than surrounding regions, while the valley enjoys morning and evening blankets of fog, all the right conditions for growing Pinot Noir.

Small berries give way to a Pinot of great concentration, with soft, ripe red fruits mingling with savory spices and and purple floral notes. There is also friendly competition between the two states and both produce some excellent Pinot's. In California, Pinot Noir has a bit more history-it was planted early on in the s and earlier in certain locations.

Some of the frustration that comes along with purchasing Pinot Noir is price and availability. Let's face it, it's not cheap to drink the best Pinot Noir. Pretty crazy! Well, good-but where do you find them? Yeah, it's not that easy, unfortunately. Sometimes you have to wait for years to get onto a mailing list from the winery just to be able to purchase or if you're less patient, you can go out onto the market and buy them online or third party.

The problem is, if you do this the markup can be anywhere from two to 10 times the list price, just because it's so scarce and everyone wants them. Thankfully not all good Pinot Noir is a cult wine and some of the best Pinot you can find right at your local wine stores or if you are lucky enough to live in wine country, at your local winery.

Do your homework-talk to people who drink Pinot Noir and ask them for some recommendations. When you go to your wine shop talk to the specialist out on the floor for some help-they are a tool for you to use, so use them before blindly picking out a bottle because it has an animal on the label and looks cute!