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
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