Pinot Gris is a black grape gone grey: a skin-colour mutation of Pinot Noir, its grey-pink berries carrying a red variety's genes into white wine. Such sports arise wherever Pinot grows old, and the grey form travelled early — through Burgundy, Switzerland and Germany, as Ruländer and Grauburgunder, and above all to Alsace, where it was long mislabelled "Tokay" despite having nothing Hungarian about it.
The grape leads two lives. In Alsace it is rich, smoky and honeyed, a deep golden wine of real weight, sweet in its late-harvest forms. In north-east Italy, picked early as Pinot Grigio, it is light, lemony and brisk — and that version's export boom from the 1990s made it one of the world's favourite white wines.