Overview of Pinot Gris Pinot Gris is classified as a black variety, but is very variable with regard to its skin color. It makes white wine, usually deeply colored (but under the name of Pinot Grigio in Italy, generally a delicate pink). The style of wine is very variable; rich and oily in Alsace, but light and spritzy in Italy. Germany has the most area planted (3,300 ha). As found in Alsace and Germany, it makes wines with high extract, low acidity, full-bodied and sometimes spicy.
The taste of Pinot Gris At its best, Pinot Gris can be spicy and oily with faintly honeyed notes, especially in Alsace, but it is usually more neutral, as typically in Italy where it may even show citrus or mineral notes. A touch of mushrooms on the nose, especially in Alsace, is a common feature of the variety.
Origins of Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, and Pinot Meunier The members of the Pinot family show several physical characteristics closely related to those of wild grapevines of the ancestral type V. vinifera ssp silvestris, and are therefore considered to be ancient cultivars. The most widely grown members of the family are Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, Pinot Gris, and Pinot Blanc. The majority of individual clones from these varieties have almost identical genetic maps, implying that they all originate from the same ancestral Pinot seedling. Two other varieties, Pinot Moure and Pinot fin teinturier (which has colored juice), are also virtually identical.
The major differences that characterize Pinot Gris and Pinot Meunier lie in the cells of their outer layer, which has a different genetic constitution from the inner tissues of the plant. Pinot Gris shows a loss of skin color compared with Pinot Noir, and is probably the result of a mutation in genes specifically of this cell layer that affect the pathway for the production of anthocyanins or other color compounds.
Pinot Meunier differs from Pinot Noir in having leaves that are densely covered with fine hairs, whereas the leaves of Pinot Noir are smooth. It turns out that this results from a single genetic difference in the pathway for producing giberellic acid, a plant hormone that controls growth. (In fact the mutation is identical to one that has been used to increase production in wheat.) This "somatic mutation" does not affect all the cells of Pinot Meunier, but only the outermost layer (technically those of the L1 epidermal layer).
This situation is possible because grapevines are propagated vegetatively, by making cuttings, instead of being grown from seeds. When a plant is grown from a seed, all its cells have the same genetic constitution. But when it is propagated by cuttings, the cell layers can inherit the properties of cell layers of the parental plant. So all Pinot Meuniers are descended from a single plant in which a somatic mutation changed the properties of just the outer cell layer. In fact, if new plants are generated from the cells of this layer (the "true" Pinot Meunier?), they form dwarf grapevines of much reduced size but with increased fruit capacity. If new plants are generated from other cell layers of Pinot Meunier, they are in fact identical to Pinot Noir. So Pinot Meunier is a chimera, with all its cells exactly the same as Pinot Noir, except for the outer layer which is the same as the cells of the dwarf plants.
Pinot Meunier
