Pinot Noir: A History of the World’s Most Prized Grape

No grape is chased harder, priced higher, or curses more winemakers than Pinot Noir. It is thin-skinned, temperamental, and maddeningly sensitive to where it grows, and it rewards the patience it demands with wines that many drinkers consider the most beautiful on earth. The world’s single most expensive wines are Pinot Noir from a few hectares in Burgundy; the idea that wine can taste of a specific place was largely worked out on this grape; and roughly half the classic white grapes of France, Chardonnay included, turn out to be its children.

It is, in other words, a grape that punches far above its acreage. To understand why sommeliers speak of Pinot Noir in almost romantic terms — and why growers call it the “heartbreak grape” — you have to follow it from Roman Gaul through a millennium of Burgundian monks, a medieval duke’s war on a rival grape, a startling DNA test, and a Hollywood movie that rewired the wine market.

An ancient and difficult grape

Pinot Noir is genetically old, one of the varieties closest to the wild grapevine and probably cultivated in Burgundy since Roman times, when writers described a prized dark grape of the region.² That antiquity comes with genetic instability: Pinot mutates readily, throwing off colour variants like Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc, which is part of why it exists as a swarm of clones rather than a single fixed type.

It is also gloriously difficult. The berries grow in tight, thin-skinned clusters that trap moisture and rot; the vine buds early, exposing it to spring frost; and it registers every nuance of soil and slope, so that a wine from one row can taste distinct from its neighbour a few metres away. Get it right and it is sublime; get it wrong and it is thin and sour. That knife-edge is why growers half-lovingly, half-bitterly call it the heartbreak grape — a variety that will break your heart as readily as it makes your reputation.

The monks who invented terroir

Pinot Noir’s greatness was not discovered so much as mapped, over centuries, by monks. From around 1000 AD the Benedictines and then the Cistercians of Burgundy farmed these slopes with monastic patience, and in the process they noticed something revolutionary: grapes from adjacent parcels, handled identically, made reliably different wine.⁷ They began walling off individual plots — the climats — the most famous being the Clos de Vougeot, enclosed in the fourteenth century.

Over generations of tasting, the monks worked out a fine-grained map of which slopes gave the finest wine, effectively inventing the concept of terroir: the idea that a wine expresses the specific place it comes from. That mosaic of named vineyards, some grand cru, some humble, still governs Burgundy today and shapes how the whole world thinks about fine wine. The notion that a bottle can taste of a particular hillside was, in a real sense, worked out by medieval monks paying very close attention to dirt.

The duke’s war on Gamay

Pinot Noir also had a royal protector. On 31 July 1395, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, issued one of history’s first great wine regulations: an edict declaring the Gamay grape “evil and disloyal,” a plant whose harsh, abundant wine was ruining Burgundy’s reputation, and ordering every Gamay vine cut down within a month and uprooted by the following Easter.³ The goal was to defend the nobler, lower-yielding Pinot Noir as the region’s official red.

It was not a gentle campaign. When the citizens of Dijon protested, Philip is said to have jailed their mayor and installed his own.³ Gamay, exiled from the good slopes, fled south to the granite of Beaujolais, where it thrives to this day — and Burgundians kept defying the ban to plant it for centuries, until the modern appellation laws of 1935 finally settled the matter in Pinot’s favour. A grape war begun in the fourteenth century took five hundred years to end.

The father of modern wine

For centuries Pinot Noir’s prestige rested on its wines. Then, in 1999, DNA testing revealed that its importance is also literally hereditary. Geneticists John Bowers and Carole Meredith at the University of California, Davis, analysed the parentage of sixteen traditional grapes of northeastern France — including Chardonnay, Gamay, Aligoté, and Melon de Bourgogne, the grape of Muscadet — and found they were all the offspring of a single unlikely pairing: noble Pinot and an obscure white grape called Gouais Blanc.¹

The twist is that Gouais Blanc was a peasant grape, so ordinary that it was later banned in parts of France and is now barely planted. Yet this humble variety, growing in the same medieval vineyards as aristocratic Pinot, crossed with it again and again to produce a whole dynasty of great grapes. Pinot supplied the pedigree, Gouais the genetic diversity, and between them the odd couple seeded much of the modern wine world — which is why Pinot is sometimes called the father of modern wine.

The most coveted wine on earth

Follow Pinot Noir to its peak and you arrive at a handful of tiny walled vineyards in the village of Vosne-Romanée. The grandest, Romanée-Conti, is barely 1.8 hectares, yet its wines from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti are the most expensive on the planet.⁶ A single bottle of the 1945 vintage — a year the estate made only around 600 bottles — sold at auction for $812,500, the record for any wine.⁶

The prices are extreme, but they follow a logic: minuscule quantities, centuries of accumulated reputation, and a grape so bound to its site that these few rows genuinely cannot be replicated anywhere else.⁴ The same variety also forms the backbone of Champagne, where Pinot Noir is pressed pale to add body and structure to the world’s most famous sparkling wine — proof that a grape can be both the rarest of collectibles and the base of a celebratory staple.

The Sideways effect and the global chase

Pinot Noir’s modern fame owes an odd debt to Hollywood. In the 2004 film Sideways, the wine-obsessed hero Miles rhapsodises about fragile, hard-to-grow Pinot Noir while sneering at easy, popular Merlot — and audiences listened. In the three years after the film, American Pinot Noir sales jumped about 16 percent while Merlot slipped, and the shift stuck: California Merlot plantings fell by roughly a third over the following two decades as Pinot acreage nearly doubled.⁵ Wine economists still call it the “Sideways effect.”

The hunt for great Pinot has since gone global, precisely because the grape is such a faithful reporter of place. Growers chase it into every cool pocket of the wine world — the Willamette Valley of Oregon, Central Otago in New Zealand, Germany’s Ahr and Baden (where it is called Spätburgunder), and the fog-cooled edges of California such as the Sonoma Coast and Sta. Rita Hills.⁸ Each region is chasing the same thing the Burgundian monks were after a thousand years ago: the particular, unrepeatable taste of one patch of ground, captured in the most heartbreaking grape there is. (See also our look at the Pinot family tree.)

This day in wine history

Key dates in the rise of the world’s most prized grape.

• Roman era
  Pinot arrives in Gaul

  A prized dark grape, most likely an ancestor of Pinot Noir, is cultivated in Roman Burgundy.

• c. 1336
  The monks wall the Clos de Vougeot

  Cistercian monks enclose their great Burgundian vineyard, refining the map of climats that becomes the idea of terroir.

• 31 July 1395
  Philip the Bold bans Gamay

  The Duke of Burgundy outlaws the “evil and disloyal” Gamay to protect Pinot Noir as the region’s noble red.

  ▸ More from this day →

• 1999
  Pinot revealed as a parent grape

  DNA testing shows Pinot and Gouais Blanc are the parents of Chardonnay, Gamay, and 14 other varieties.

• 2004
  The Sideways effect

  A hit film sends Pinot Noir sales soaring and Merlot into retreat, reshaping the American wine market.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Pinot Noir’s extended family tree
• Pinot Gris vs Pinot Grigio, a colour mutation of Pinot Noir itself
• Alsace, another home of the Pinot family
• The origins of wine

References

1. J. Bowers & C. Meredith, “Historical Genetics: The Parentage of Chardonnay, Gamay, and Other Wine Grapes of Northeastern France,” Science 285 (1999). ↩
2. Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding & José Vouillamoz, Wine Grapes (Allen Lane, 2012), Pinot Noir entry. ↩
3. “The Exile of Burgundy” (Philip the Bold’s 1395 Gamay ban), Wine Spectator. winespectator.com. ↩
4. Jancis Robinson (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Wine (Pinot Noir; Burgundy; Champagne). ↩
5. “The Sideways Effect,” NPR (2017), citing a Sonoma State University study. npr.org. ↩
6. “1945 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti sets auction record,” Robb Report. robbreport.com. ↩
7. Jasper Morris, Inside Burgundy (BBR Press) — on the Cistercians and the origins of terroir. ↩
8. Marq de Villiers, The Heartbreak Grape: A California Winemaker’s Search for the Perfect Pinot Noir (HarperCollins). ↩

The Heartbreak Grape
Marq de Villiers
A vivid chronicle of one winemaker’s obsessive quest to tame Pinot Noir in California.

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