Second Thoughts on Pinot Grigio?

Sue and I find that we are having second thoughts about Pinot Grigio. And that’s a good thing.

I am not quite sure where and when it began, but we must have had a series of disappointing Pinot Grigio (PG) experiences. Maybe we were at too many receptions where PG was offered as the white wine alternative to Chardonnay. The wines seemed designed to avoid offending anyone, with no distinctive characteristic to raise eyebrows or draw attention and no rough edges either.

Pinot Grigio became a reliable cooking wine at our house, but not something that we’d go out of our way to drink.

Suddenly this Summer …

Then suddenly this summer something changed and now we find ourselves on the lookout for interesting PG wines to try. I think it started when we flew to northeast Italy to visit the Collio DOC region. We spent two mornings blind-tasting dozens of Collio wines: Ribolla Gialla, Friulano, Malvasia, Sauvignon, Collio Bianco. All of them were interesting and delicious.

But it was the Pinot Grigio that surprised us. We spent an hour happily working our way through 14 different Pinot Grigio Collio DOC wines. The wines were different from the stereotype imprinted on our memory. The differences in terroir and vintage came through clearly. If this was Pinot Grigio, we decided, we needed to pay more attention.

Then we started tasting Friulian Pinot Grigio wines made in the traditional copper-color Ramato style, which someone described as somewhere between Rosé and an Orange wine. These wines were recognizably still Pinot Grigio but taken in a different direction. How interesting.

Serious Fun with Pinot Grigio

Back home, we started looking for Pinot Grigio with character and we found interesting Pinot Grigio wines at a local tasting of Elena Walch and Cantina Terlan wines from Alto Adige. Different from the Friuli wines and different from one another. Fascinating. A trip to Total Wine gave us more to drink and think about. It was interesting that Ramato-style wines were featured in the Pinot Grigio section.

We even enjoyed a sort of “back to the future” Pinot Grigio from Friuli producer Eugenio Collavini. Their delicious Villa Canlungo Pinot Grigio DOC Collio is the result of Manlio Collavini’s mad experiment. It is a white wine, one of the first white Pinot Grigio wines made in Collio back in the day when Ramato set the standard. Now white is the norm and Ramato gets attention. Funny how things get all topsy-turvy!

We re-discovered an old favorite at a wine dinner that our friends at Ricardo’s  Kitchen & Bar in Lacey, Washington, organized. It was Julia’s Dazzle from the Long Shadows winery. They let their Pinot Grigio grapes get very ripe indeed, and the dazzling result is more like a Rosé.

But wait, there’s more. The Graziano family was among the first to plant Pinot Grigio in California and their wine stood out as we began exploring American products. Grapes from old vines in Mendocino are barrel-fermented and sur lie-aged for their Monte Volpe PG. It turns out that if you treat Pinot Grigio like a serious wine, you can make a serious wine with character and complexity. Who knew?

All Along the Wine Wall

Sue was prowling the wine wall at the Proctor Metropolitan Market and stumbled upon a wine with “Ramato” in big letters. But it was from Washington, not Italy. So we had to try it. The deeply colored and intriguing wine is made by Sage Rat wines in the Rattlesnake Hills AVA near Yakima, Washington. It is an example of how the idea of interesting Pinot Grigio (and the traditional Friulian skin-contact method, too) is rapidly spreading.

We’ve changed our minds about Pinot Grigio and are now on the lookout for interesting PG wines. So what’s the point? Well, there are a lot of wines that have been stereotyped in one way or another (think post-Sideways Merlot, post-Yellow Tail Syrah/Shiraz, or post-Blue Nun Riesling). Stereotypes and fashions are powerful forces, but once you break through them you often discover a more complex and interesting world. That applies to Pinot Grigio … and a whole lot more.

No one likes a wishy-washy person, but sometimes it is good to have second thoughts.