Puiattino Pinot Grigio, Friuli, Itay 2020 (£10, Tesco) A lot as I like to think about myself as a good and goal critic of all issues vinous, I've to confess to a couple cussed prejudices. I’m instinctively suspicious, for instance, of any wine poured from a bottle with a shiny animal cartoon on the label; of any wine promoting for far more than £30 in its very first classic; and of something with the phrases oak, barrels, espresso or chocolate too distinguished within the title or back-label description. I’m not saying that the prejudices are insurmountable. However in every case the wine must be actually fairly distinctive if it’s going to interrupt down a resistance constructed on years of disappointments. All of which is true, too, for an additional of my most resilient unconscious biases: grocery store pinot grigio. So boring and interchangeable are most examples of the favored dry white, that when a wine as fluent, pear-juicy and subtly honeyed as Puiattino’s crops up among the many also-rans in a Tesco lineup I feel I could be forgiven for doing a double-take.
Cavit Rulendis Pinot Grigio, Trentino Superiore, Italy 2019 (from £14.99, aitkenwines.com; kwoff.co.uk) I mentioned “grocery store pinot grigio”, however you could find loads of examples of the tasteless, watery, industrial model of the grape in pubs, eating places and impartial wine retailers, too. In lots of circumstances these aren’t unhealthy wines precisely, simply not one thing to seize the creativeness or provoke a shiver of enjoyment or misty-eyed reflection like the most effective wines do. That pinot grigio has this repute should be infuriating for the producers who use it to make wines filled with distinctive character and elegance. You'll find these producers dotted all through pinot grigio’s northeastern Italian homeland. Most of them are of the small, family-run, artisanal selection, however one of the enticing pinot grigios I’ve tried lately is from certainly one of Italy’s bigger producers: the 4,500-grower Trentino co-operative, Cavit. The hot button is within the vineyards: steeply sloping, south-facing, high-altitude spots within the foothills of the Brenta Dolomites, producing a wine as coolly energetic as a mountain stream, and as aromatic as a spring meadow.
Radikon Sivi Pinot Grigio, Italy 2019 (from £36, juicedwine; buonvino.co.uk) Most of the finest pinot grigio producers ply their commerce within the far northeastern Friuli-Venezia-Giulia area. Within the west, I’d pick the racy purity of Russolo Pinot Grigio Ronco Calaj 2020 (£14.01, shelvedwine.com). To the east, in Colli Orientali, you could find a mixture of unforced depth of flavour with delicate spice, white flowers and that essential driving freshness in a wine equivalent to Livio Felluga Pinot Grigio 2020 (£27, petershamcellar.com). In Isonzo, within the southeast of the area, you may get a richer dose of mouthfilling spicy and exotic-fruited ripeness that's akin to the wines created from the identical selection beneath its French alias, pinot gris, in Alsace within the form of Lis Neris Gris Pinot Grigio 2018 (£35.90, hedonism.co.uk); and in Collio within the far east of Friuli, straddling the border of Slovenia, you get the intensely herby-nutty, tangy, subtly grippy swirl of Radikon’s Sivi orange wine, made with prolonged contact between the juice and pinot grigio’s pinkish-grey skins.
Comply with David Williams on Twitter @Daveydaibach
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