Introduction to Pinot Noir Tasting

Friday evening at Norbeck Country Club in Rockville MD I led a Pinot Noir Wine Tasting. Thirty-four people attended and they had a wide range of backgrounds from wine novices to oenophiles and the feedback was very positive from all attendees. We tasted four Pinot Noir wines that were in the $20-25 price range at our local liquor stores that are run by Montgomery County, MD. The liquor license of Norbeck Country Club requires that they purchase all alcohol beverages through the county stores and what they have in inventory severely limits the choices available. Each wine was from one of the four major regions making excellent Pinot Noir: France, California, Oregon, and New Zealand. We then finished with a very nice French Burgundy, the Louis Latour Marsannay Rouge, that was over $50 to show the taste difference as you move up the price spectrum. We had wanted to end with a Premier Cru Burgundy but the county only had one that they were carrying and they only had 3 bottles of it which was not enough for the size of our group so we went with the Marsannay.

Two files are available for download. The first is the place mat that we used so each person knew which wine they were drinking. I wanted people to compare the wines from the different regions so we poured 3 oz servings which let people go back each time I introduced a new wine and see how it compared with the prior wines. By having the place mat they could keep track of which wine was which over the hour long tasting. We had also poured all the wines into the glasses before the people arrived so they could see how they opened up over time and improved in taste. The second file is two pages. the firs is the list of the five wines we tasted and sources for them beyond the County Stores. The second page is a list of 38 other Pinot Noirs at different price points from each of the four regions that I recommended.

The prevailing sentiment was that the Louis Latour Marsannay Rouge and the Willamette Valley Vineyards (WVV) Whole Cluster Pinot Noir were the top wines of the five. Some of the people liked either the Rodney Strong or the Oyster Bay but the majority liked the Whole Cluster and the Louis Latour the most. If people were spending their own money they would go for the Whole Cluster since it was only $25 from the Willamette Valley Vineyards web site which is https://www.wvv.com/Shop-Wines/Willamette-Valley-Vineyards/Browse-All. If someone else was buying, they would probably go for the Louis Latour at $53. It is a real tribute to the Whole Cluster Pinot Noir that it was rated very close to a wine more than twice its price. I had a short video of the WVV founder, Jim Bernau, telling us how he creates the Whole Cluster Pinot Noir and the link to a youtube recording of that video is https://youtu.be/kjrJLE-PVWo.

I let the audience know that the two wines that will be on our table this Thanksgiving are the Whole Cluster Pinot Noir and WVV’s Pinot Gris which I wrote about in an earlier Post of this blog. I am checking out the While Cluster Rose that Jim talks about in the video and may be serving that as the before dinner wine on Thanksgiving.