Pinot Meunier Tasting

Last night we had about 20 people attending the class. We started off with an introduction to wine making. This will be part of a continuing series as we head into harvest and wine making season. We followed that with a description of Pinot Meunier (pronounced Pea-no Mooney-eh). Meunier means miller and is named because of the white flour-like dusty sheen caused by the fine white hairs on the leaves of this vine. Pinot Meunier is a red grape mutant of Pinot Noir. It is commonly used in small proportions in Champagne. We blind tasted 100% Pinot Meunier wines from 2005 and 2009 and mixed in a Pinot Noir from 2009. The drought-stressed 2009 Pinot Meunier and Pinot Noir were the favorites. They were deep dark red wines with notes of Black Cherry aromas. As usual there was a diversity of opinion and almost every wine was a favorite of one or more persons.