Pinot Grigio

Pinot Grigio can be an attraction - or a deterrent - depending on which of the countless versions of it you come upon. Buying it by the (usually large) glass in a wine bar - or by the bottle in a mixed case from a wine suppier - can be two ways of getting your hands on something unpalatable. By the glass, unless you know your Pinots,  it tends to be considerably overpriced. In a mixed case, not so very differently perhaps, it seems  too often like a worthless add-on to the rest of what you have bought.

But as a restaurant house wine from Valvona & Crolla, or in what used to be Centro Tre in George Street, it is a safe buy because these places  themselves buy from safe producers, invariably in northern Italy, though the grape - and the wine -is spreading like an epidemic to other Italian regions.

Indeed my latest find - which comes from a consistently interesting supplier, Naked Wines of Norfolk - is not Italian at all, but Australian.

It is the 2013 vintage of a wine unappealingly (or perhaps wittily) named Heresy Pinot Grigio, and it comes from the SW Australian producer Kevin McArthy, whose family have been making it for quarter of a century.

It is clean, bright, and crisp, not by Italian standards an immediately recognisable Pinot, but a pleasing aperitif and good with all  the dishes, including pizza, that Pinot traditionally accompanies.

At £7.99 to Naked Wine customers, coyly identified as Angels, it is worth sampling, as also is the northern Italian Vivolo Pinot Grigio, costing a pound less. Also  from Naked Wines, and undeniably mass produced, it is something I have gone back to more than once and have not quite tired of yet.

17 October 2014