one vine, copiedThe family and the catalogue
Pinot noir mutates readily and gets propagated by cuttings, so every vine in every vineyard is a copy of a copy. Two things follow: a family of colour mutations that are the same vine under other names, and a catalogue of numbered selections a grower can order by post.
The family
Solid lines are mutations of one vine. The line to chardonnay and gamay is a cross: pinot × Gouais blanc, which produced sixteen varieties that between them plant half of France.
Pinot's child by Gouais blanc, and the white grape sharing almost every hill in this directory. Where pinot goes, it follows — Burgundy, Champagne, the Willamette, Bien Nacido, Central Otago.
An early-ripening pinot that comes in two to three weeks ahead of the rest. Germany kept it alive in the Ahr and on the Nahe when growers elsewhere pulled it out for cropping too lightly.
Pinot's other well-known child, banished from the Côte d'Or by ducal edict and sent south to granite, where it built Beaujolais.
Pinot noir with white down on its shoot tips and leaves — meunier means miller, and the vine looks dusted with flour. It buds later, ripens earlier and survives a frosty Champagne spring that kills its parent.
The white end of the family. A further mutation that can come from pinot gris or pinot noir and can go back the other way, which is why nurserymen watch their mother vines.
A colour sport of pinot: the berry loses most of its pigment and lands somewhere between grey, pink and bronze. Same vine, same bunch, different skin.
A black grape from north-eastern France that ripens early, carries thin skin over tight pinecone-shaped bunches, and mutates more readily than almost any vine in cultivation.
The numbered ones
Each row is a single mother vine, tested clean and copied. The number is the nursery's; the behaviour is the grower's problem.
| clone | where it comes from | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| Abel clone | Burgundy field selection | New Zealand's most-told vine story: a cutting confiscated at Auckland airport in the 1970s, handed to a customs officer who happened to make wine, propagated, and now planted the length of the country. |
| Pinot Droit | Burgundy field selection | Upright-growing, high-cropping selections that suited a grower paid by weight. California sold a series of them under the misnomer 'Gamay Beaujolais', and Burgundy planted them in ground where nobody was looking. |
| Pommard, UCD 4 | Burgundy field selection | The workhorse of American pinot noir before the Dijon numbers arrived, and still planted everywhere. Bigger berries, firmer structure, a darker wine than the Dijons give. |
| Calera selection | California | Cuttings Josh Jensen is said to have brought back from Burgundy in the mid-1970s, planted on Mount Harlan and passed around California since. Growers who plant it say so on the label. |
| Mount Eden selection | California | A California field selection traced back to Martin Ray's plantings in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and through him, by the usual account, to Paul Masson's cuttings from Burgundy. Tiny clusters, tiny crop. |
| Swan selection | California | A Russian River field selection off Joseph Swan's vineyard, planted through Sonoma for its small berries and its dark, savoury wine. |
| Dijon 115 | Dijon | Small berries, small bunches, early ripening, aromatic. The most planted of the Dijon selections in the New World and the one growers reach for when a site needs perfume. |
| Dijon 667 | Dijon | The third of the trio that travelled: mid-weight, spicy, and useful for filling the gap between 115's perfume and 777's colour. |
| Dijon 777 | Dijon | Deeper colour, smaller crop, more tannin than 115. Planted where a grower wants weight without waiting for a warm year. |
| Wädenswil, UCD 2A | Swiss | A Swiss research-station selection that reached Oregon early and stayed. Lighter in colour, higher in aromatics, and often blended against Pommard to fill the middle. |
Where a selection's origin is trade folklore rather than a document — and several of the famous ones are — the record says so on its own page. The whole story →