Whether you call it by its French or Italian name, pinot gris/grigio has become a remarkable success story in Australia.
First emerging as an alternative to both the too-opulent chardonnays of the ’90s and the ‘sauvalanche’ of exuberantly fruity New Zealand sauvignon blanc that swiftly followed, pinot gris/grigio is now a firmly entrenched part of the Australian wine landscape – currently clocking in at third place on the league chart of white grape varieties. It can also be made into a dazzling array of styles, from crisp and fresh to luscious and full-bodied, not to mention cherry-red skin-contact wines.
Gris and grigio both mean ‘grey’ in French and Italian, respectively – a reference to the fact that the variety’s berries are neither fully white nor red when properly ripe, rather range from a brown-tinged pink through to a vivid, bright purple. (Both the French and Italian languages use noir or nero, for ‘black’, to refer to red wine grapes.)
The ‘pinot’ part is relatively self-explicatory – pinot gris/grigio is in fact a colour mutation of pinot noir, the unintended consequence of spontaneous mutations in the variety’s genetic code as it has been propagated via vine cuttings over centuries. Grape vine experts therefore get a bit upset when people refer to pinot gris/grigio as its own grape variety – strictly speaking, it’s a loose collection of different pinot noir clones, as is the white-berried pinot blanc.
Despite this, pinot gris/grigio is functionally a very different beast to pinot noir, so it makes sense to think of it as its own variety (as the governmental agency Wine Australia does).
Because pinot noir has been widely cultivated in Europe for centuries, no one place can claim to be the sole birthplace of the gris/grigio colour mutation – it spontaneously appeared in Burgundy, France and in the Pfalz and Baden-Württemberg regions of Germany, in both cases likely around the start of the 1700s.
The variety’s true homes, though, are in Alsace, France and Italy’s north-east (around the Veneto, Friuli–Venezia Giulia, and Trentino–Alto Adige regions), where two very different styles of wine made from the grape variety have emerged. In the relatively warm and dry Alsace region, pinot gris has become both a workhorse grape for simpler textural whites, as well as making profound dry wines when grown in favoured ‘grand cru’ sites – luscious and ripe wines, sometimes with a hint of smoke, that can develop biscuity characters as they age. The variety’s propensity to developing botrytis also makes Alsatian pinot gris a canvas for some of the great sweet wines of the world.
A surprisingly large quantity of the variety is grown across the border in Germany, where it is known as grauburgunder (literally ‘grey Burgundy’) and turned into wines that are broadly similar to entry-level Alsatian examples, albeit a little fresher and lighter in alcohol. In Italy, by contrast, the variety is usually turned into very crisp and fresh (but often blandly neutral) dry white wines.
The fact that the variety goes by both French and Italian names in Australia creates a lot of confusion for consumers, leading to some to believe that the names refer to separate varieties – not to mention some interesting hybrid pronunciations that attempt to split the difference between ‘gris’ and ‘grigio’.
Broadly speaking, though, the name a winemaker chooses for the label should in theory indicate the style the wine has been made in – ‘gris’ indicating that the wine is more akin to the textural, richer styles of Alsace and has potentially seen some barrel work, while ‘grigio’ points towards Italian-inspired zippy, dry, and mineral styles usually fermented in stainless steel.
As with all things in wine, though, the devil is in the detail – and the picture for gris/grigio is a little more complex here in Australia than a simple binary would suggest. To understand this, though, we’ll first have to take a little detour via the Veneto.
The Italian job
While many of the world’s producers and consumers consider those honeyed, opulent Alsatian pinot gris wines to be the benchmark of what the variety can achieve, its real engine-room is Italy’s north-east.
At the most recent global grape variety census (2017), Italy lead the world’s plantings of the variety, with approximately 25,000 hectares under vine. Most Italian pinot grigio is grown in the north, primarily the Veneto (38%), Friuli-Venezia Giulia (27%) and Trentino-Alto Adige (17%). The easygoing and wildly popular wines that are made under the Pinot Grigio Delle Venezie DOC, which can source grapes from anywhere within those three large administrative regions, are the wines most likely to conform to the idea of a crisp, simple Italian style.
That style, in turn, derives from one specific brand – Santa Margherita. Count Gaetano Marzotto founded the estate that would go on to be called Santa Margherita in 1935, having won the land in a bet – a thousand or so hectares of what was essentially Veneto swampland, at the time populated only by mosquitoes and muskrats.
While he eventually rehabilitated that land and planted much of it with vines, the fruit for Marzotto’s original pinot grigio wine came from Alto Adige. (The estate now makes a specific regional bottling from Alto Adige fruit.)
The wine was one of the first table whites in Italy made in a clean and technically-focused way, with Marzotto having been inspired by the making of sparkling prosecco wines in steel tanks. He pressed the grapes quickly and used refrigerated fermentation vessels and other modern techniques to avoid taking on colour and tannin from the grape’s skin – instead focusing on bringing out the variety’s pear, citrus and white floral side in the finished wine. The first vintage, 1960, was a revelation for its time, and proved quite successful on the domestic market when it was released in the February of the following year.
It wasn’t until 1979, though, that Santa Margherita really took flight. That year, the American wine importer Anthony Terlato discovered the wine, and saw an opportunity. After convincing the Count to enter Santa Margherita in a blind tasting, it triumphed as Italy’s finest white wine – in the States, at least. What followed was a mammoth global success story that continues to this day, with some 6.6 million of Santa Margherita’s annual production of ten million bottles sent to the American market, where the variety remains practically synonymous with this one producer.
While Santa Margherita’s pinot grigio wasn’t a bargain-priced wine, it was democratically affordable – and it spawned a legion of imitators that charged considerably less, alongside a pinot grigio planting boom. While Italy’s vineyard area has been shrinking in general, declining 20% over the fifteen years prior to 2017, the area dedicated to pinot grigio increased by 34% in that time period, making it one of only two varieties to buck the downward trend. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the other variety was prosecco, which grew 24% in the same period.)
Choice of grape variety aside, Marzotto’s wine was not unlike the riesling and semillon-based whites that were starting to be made in Australia around the same time. This was a period when technology was starting to have a significant impact on wine, and technically precise, scientifically minded winemaking became the order of the day. Refrigeration, sterile filtration, pneumatic presses, effective yeast cultures, stainless steel tanks … these all changed the course of white wine in the twentieth century. This was especially true for pinot grigio, because the pinky-purple nature of grigio’s skin means it can have a significant impact on the finished wine, even if contact is kept very brief.
You’re making me blush!
Prior to Santa Margherita’s technical innovations, Italian pinot grigios would have invariably had some shade of coppery blush, as some contact between the juice and those bright purple skins is inevitable in traditional wine presses. That coppery tinge had been taken further in Friuli, where the ‘ramato’ tradition saw pinot grigio wines rest an even longer time on skins to create a purposefully deeper hue (ramato means ‘coppery’ in Italian).
In addition to deepening the colour, this process also imparts more tannic grip, structure, texture, and flavour to the finished wine, courtesy of chemical compounds known as phenols present in the skins.
Even without skin contact, the grigios of Italy vary greatly. The alluvial soils of the Isonzo and Grave plains in Friuli make finer, more gravelly wines. Heading to the hillier country of Collio and Colli Orientali near the Slovenian border, the wines from the sandstone and marl soils (locally called ponca) can be quite powerful – intensely flavoured and full-bodied. Over in Alto Adige, the morainal soils (formed by ancient glaciers), elevated cool climate and ample sunshine can result in crystalline, pure wines with impressive fruit depth.
The small-scale, artisanal pinot grigios of Italy are a vastly more diverse and delicious set of wines than the Italian take on the variety’s reputation, driven by Santa Margherita and its lookalikes, has lead many to believe.
In Friuli, winemakers are returning to the region’s roots and are once again making ramato styles of grigio, which had been all but wiped out once local makers started to emulate Santa Margherita.
One of the champions of the ramato style was Livio Felluga, whose wine was already in the American market before Santa Margherita. Like Marzotto’s wine, Felluga’s was also bright and fruit forward, employing some of those modern methods – but Felluga’s had a gentle petroleum-like tinge of copper, and it remains that way today. More radically minded producers such as Josko Gravner and Stanko Radikon took skin contact further, leaving their white wines on skins for extended periods and ageing them in clay amphorae or old oak (respectively).
Those producers and their descendants are now focused on white varieties indigenous to the region such as ribolla gialla, but the impression they made on a global cohort of pinot grigio producers with their skin-contact versions was nothing short of profound.
From alternative to mainstream
Catalogued as ‘pineau gris’ in Busby’s list of imported vine cuttings in the 1830s, the variety never made a lasting impression in early Australian viticulture. In fact, no extant pinot gris/grigio vines in Australia descend from Busby’s initial importation – all current plantings come from more modern sources.
The first was via Charles Sturt University at Wagga Wagga in the late ’70s, where Brian Croser and Tony Jordan had planted the grape from a UC Davis clone (identified as ‘D1V7’) in a nursery block of mixed varieties.
Although it had been planted elsewhere, pinot gris/grigio’s moment in the sun came when winemakers Kathleen Quealy and Kevin McCarthy saw its potential for the Mornington Peninsula.
The pair were making wine for others in the region in the late 80s, with pinot noir and chardonnay the order of the day for the Peninsula (as they still are). Going against the vogue of the time for big, opulent chardonnays, Quealy believed that the relatively cool and long growing season of the region was perfect for flavoursome white wines that didn’t need the seasoning of new oak.
Convincing her employers at the time was another matter, though – so the pair established their T’Gallant label in 1990, with the first release being an unoaked chardonnay, followed by a pinot noir rosé early the following year.
The pair also believed that the region’s climate would excel for pinot gris/grigio, and they were drawn to the variety’s versatility to craft different styles of wine. They tried to convince the growers they worked with to plant it – but their approach was about as successful as trying to convince their former employers to make more refined examples of chardonnay.
Quealy claims that they would have approached over fifty growers at the time, before finally sourcing some gris/grigio fruit in 1992. They decided to plant the variety at T’Gallant in ’94, deliberately organising the plantings so their site would readily yield two different styles of fruit – one leaner, and one that would achieve higher ripeness.
T’Gallant’s early experiments in the variety yielded a few different bottlings, some labelled ‘gris’ and some ‘grigio’, following – or perhaps establishing for this country – the traditional stylistic line between the two.
From crisp and bright aperitif-style numbers to those riper, more textural Alsace-inspired wines – and taking in some late-harvest dessert styles, too – T’Gallant defined the variety in this country and built a market for it. That success (alongside their other well-regarded wines) saw the brand eventually purchased by corporate behemoth Treasury Wine Estates in 2003, with McCarthy and Quealy using the proceeds of the sale to bankroll their own Peninsula estate, Quealy Winemakers.
Even though T’Gallant’s gris/grigio wines had a significant impact, it took a little longer for the variety to take off in a broader commercial context. But catch on it eventually did.
In 2004, only 329 hectares of plantings were recorded around the country, yet by 2012 there were 3,767 hectares – a more than elevenfold increase in a mere eight years. And while the last national vineyard area survey took place in 2015, the variety’s contribution in tonnes to the national crush shows that its presence in Australia continues to grow.
Pinot gris/grigio is now the third most important white wine grape variety in Australia by weight, with 92,714 tonnes (nearly 13% of all white wine grapes) crushed in 2025. That’s an enormous achievement for a variety that was included in the Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show up until 2009 – and proof that it has truly entered Australian wine’s mainstream.
Growing grey
There is little doubt that the bulk of Australia’s gris/grigio is the Davis clone D1V7, propagated via Wagga Wagga, which has a propensity to high vigour and yield. That propensity is no doubt a boon to growers keener on volume than character – and there are plenty of those, given that just over 70% of Australia’s gris/grigio in 2025 was grown in the hot, irrigated inland zones of South Eastern Australia.
You might, therefore, be tempted to cast D1V7 as the villain of the gris/grigio story in Australia – just as the merlot clone D3V14 has been denounced as the source of merlot’s bad reputation on these shores. But it’s a clone that Quealy believes can be highly successful when it’s managed as you would any other vines intended for quality wine.
“The main clone in Australia is shaped like and behaves like MV6 pinot noir,” she says, “a small-berried, small-bunch variety. Australia was fortunate to begin its pinot gris journey with such a superior clone, and I suspect that is why little attention has been spent finding alternative ones.”
D1V7’s ability to both make premium wine and also service a price-competitive market no doubt gives it a distinct advantage.
“Australia was fortunate to begin its pinot gris journey with such a superior clone, and I suspect that is why little attention has been spent finding alternative ones.”
In 2001 the Chalmers vine nursery added some genetic diversity to the country’s plantings with a clone taken from Friuli named VCR5, which is lower-yielding and thus generally more intense in flavour. It also has a looser bunch structure that is less prone to botrytis – the famous ‘noble rot’ that isn’t always quite so noble if you want to make quality dry wines.
Kim Chalmers believes the original clone first came into Victoria in about 1964, before making its way to Wagga Wagga.
“Apparently there are also others,” she says. “D1V10 and E6V3 both CSIRO, 1968 and INRA, NSW, 1969 – although I have never heard of them being commercially planted/propagated or used anywhere.”
Site matters, too. While Quealy believes that the hot, irrigated inland regions may produce good enough fruit for simpler wines, she argues that you need the right conditions to make quality textural wine.
“I think pinot gris has grown up in Australia,” she says. “And notions about skin colour are top of the list of concerns. When pinot gris is grown in regions of great heat and sunshine, there’s a tendency to hide the grapes in a lush overhanging canopy, but grapes are green rather than the deep purple necessary to signal full ripeness.”
Quealy argues that grapes with green skins will produce similarly green flavours in the fruit and wines:
“Pinot gris is susceptible to vegetal aromas and tastes when canopies are piled with leaves and the sunshine does not hit the grapes,” she says, noting that dulled colour in the fruit can also be a warning sign. “In my experience, the vivid purple can brown up in poorer years, perhaps with the overapplication of irrigation. I think in premium pinot gris, the vines are treated as pinot noir – maximum exposure and minimum or zero irrigation.”
As you would expect from a pioneer of the region, Quealy is an advocate for the cool climate of the Mornington Peninsula for gris/grigio – and she believes that the soil profile is just as important as a long ‘hang time’ to obtain ripe, healthy grapes.
“Pinot gris grown in deeper soils with corresponding longer hang times – typical of, say, Main Ridge, Red Hill and parts of Adelaide Hills – requires massive exposure to cool sunshine to ripen its flavours and to avoid the latent botrytis emerging in the moist late autumn,” she says.
She notes that lighter soils generally can’t sustain a canopy healthy enough to keep the grapes replenished over a long season.
Skin in the game
While Quealy and McCarthy were also trailblazers for skin-contact white wines in Australia, Quealy generally prefers not to employ skin contact in her pinot gris/grigio wines. That’s a personal stylistic choice – but other Australian makers are increasingly using skin contact as a component of gris/grigio wines, creating an array of wines from those that look like classic Provence-styled rosés to those that possess deep cherry-red colours, intense red fruit flavours, and red wine–like tannic structures.
Meg Brodtmann MW, winemaker and wine educator at Prince Wine Store, believes that skins can add plenty of complexity:
“Extended skin contact followed by pressing allows you to extract some phenolics and colour,” she says. “Phenolics are a bit like baby tannins, adding mouthfeel and grip to skin-contact wine. Extended skin contact, say four to twenty-four hours, also extracts more flavour and aroma compounds as well as adding to that oily texture you sometimes get in gris.”
Brodtmann notes that the colour will naturally increase with longer time on skins, too, as the grape’s pigments (also known as anthocyanins) are held in the skins – but she believes that the most important contribution of the technique is tannin and flavour.
“When I’ve made a full skins gris, I leave the wine on skins for anywhere between three weeks to three months, but taste every day to check the grippiness and ensure balance in the wine. For me, it is all about layering on complexity and structure,” she says.
Kate McIntyre MW is a strong advocate for the classic Alsace-inspired ‘gris style’ that her family’s Mooroooduc Estate label makes, which has become a Mornington Peninsula staple – but she is almost evangelical in her love for Moorooduc’s skinsy version.
“The colour we get in the skin of our pinot gris is so intense that it seems a shame to just chuck them out,” she says, “and when we ferment on skins you can really see the family resemblance between pinots gris and noir, and I think that is why I am such a fan.”
“The aroma and flavour profile changes from pear, quince and honey to rhubarb, strawberry, pomegranate, salted plums and pickled ginger, and the phenolics are also really satisfying. The best skin-fermented pinot gris behave like very light red wines and they work so well with lots of foods that are quite difficult to match to wine – tomato, artichokes, chilli, raw fish, wasabi. Also, that colour is so damn pretty!”
That process is taken to further extremes by some makers, whose wines might not only see extended skin contact but also whole-bunch fermentation – polar opposites of the light, bright and mineral Italian ‘grigio style’ that many Australian wine drinkers cut their teeth on. These skinsy wines can evoke pinot noir, or they can show interesting bitter notes that lend them a kinship to vermouth and Italian aperitivo bitters such as Campari. Complex wines, in other words, and not for everyone – but entirely valid expressions of the variety.
Alongside richer, more textural Alsace-inspired ‘gris style’ wines – not to mention the emergence of some truly high-quality Australian examples of the Italian-inspired ‘grigio style’ that show interest and character without sacrificing refreshment – they show just what a vibrantly interesting grape variety pinot gris/grigio really is, no matter what name it might go by.
This article is courtesy of Young Gun of Wine; first published 25 September 2025.