Pinot NoirPinot Noir’s spiritual home is Burgundy, France, a narrow region about two miles wide and thirty miles long that produces wines of profound depth and complexity. Many new world wine regions in Australia, USA and New Zealand are producing wines to rival the best from France. Good Pinot Noir offers up beguiling aromas of cherries, plums, spice and even truffles or ‘forest floor’, and carries these characters on a palate renowned for its silkiness, sappiness and incredible elegance. It needs a cool climate to show its best, which is why classic regions like Victoria’s Yarra Valley, Beechworth and Mornington Peninsula are doing wonderful things with this notoriously fickle, and difficult to grow variety. Other cool southern latitudes like Tasmania and New Zealand’s central Otago are producing wonderfully powerful examples with the potential to age. Pinot Noir is also one of the principle grape varieties of Champagne, and is used extensively in sparkling wine production all over the world.
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