From the archive: Expert’s Choice – Alsace Pinot Gris

Styles evolve in Alsace as everywhere else. The climate changes, fashion demands new flavours, growers find different solutions. Pinot Gris used to be a rare grape in Alsace, with only 2% or 3% of the vineyard area. Then fashion swung its way in the 1980s and 1990s, and within a couple of decades or so it was up to 15%.

Scroll down for Margaret Rand’s top 17 Pinot Gris wines from Alsace

That’s Pinot Gris, of course, not Pinot Grigio. Alsace is Pinot Gris as it ought to be, not some insipid pretence at wine for those who don’t like the flavour of wine. (There are serious Italian versions, of course, and those people have a lot of preconceptions to overcome.) Alsace Pinot Gris is probably the reference for the grape. But references evolve, too.

Alsace as a whole is edging towards drier wines, having given us sweeter and sweeter wines in the 1990s and 2000s whether we wanted them or not. The irony is that the region is trying to make drier wines at a time when the climate is determined to give riper and riper grapes.

Pinot Gris is in the middle of the Alsace sweetness spectrum. Riesling is mostly made dry unless it’s sweet; Gewurztraminer is mostly sweet unless it’s dry. Pinot Gris can be either, according to the year – but, say the growers, it’s getting more and more difficult to make it dry. But look at the Zind-Humbrecht example below: four grams per litre of residual sugar and 13.5% alcohol. Not only dry, but reasonably light. Yet Zind-Humbrecht was in the forefront of the movement towards ever-greater ripeness and ever-greater power. Okay, it’s a 2012, and that was a vintage of slow sugar accumulation, but still. It’s a sign of change.

‘The best can be the enemy of the good,’ says Olivier Zind-Humbrecht MW. ‘By trying too hard you can end up with unbalanced wines. In Alsace that means picking too ripe, beating the record, and doing as much as you can. But too much is not necessarily good.’

Now he wants elegance and freshness; but that’s never just a question of picking earlier. What you need is physiological ripeness at the same time as sugar ripeness, rather than afterwards, and that long experience of getting grapes really, really ripe has taught him how to get them physiologically ripe earlier, before the sugar rockets.

Even so, there’s only a short window of optimum ripeness with Pinot Gris: leave it a couple of days too long, and you have too much opulence, not enough acidity. Let the yield get too high and quality suffers instantly: it’s as tricky a grape to get right as Pinot Noir.

The 2013 vintage was another year of slow sugar accumulation, and 2014 was also a year of restraint and good acidity. If you, like me, were finding Alsace had become a little too lush, a little top-heavy, then now is the time to come back to it, because (oh, blessed swing of the pendulum!) it’s coming back to us.

Margaret Rand is an award-winning wine writer and author (with Oz Clarke) of Grapes & Wines (Pavillion, 2015, revised)

These wines were the best of those tasted, non-blind, at a trade tasting in London in September 2015.

Margaret’s top Alsace Pinot Gris wine recommendations:

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