What is Pinot Noir? Inside a Yorkshire Harvest

It’s just after seven in the morning at Nun Monkton and the rows are cold enough to make your fingers ache. Secateurs click, crates fill slowly, and the air smells of wet leaves and something very close to strawberry jam. This is Pinot Noir harvest, and this is our guide to what Pinot Noir actually is, written from inside a vineyard that grows it.

It’s a fair thing to ask us about, too. Pinot Noir is the grape winemakers love to moan about. It’s thin-skinned, fussy and quick to sulk, and the received wisdom says it needs somewhere like Burgundy to do its best work. England was meant to be a stretch. Yorkshire was meant to be out of the question.

We grow it anyway. Here’s what it is, why it’s the hardest grape on our patch, and what ends up in the glass when it all comes good.

What is Pinot Noir?

Pinot Noir is a thin-skinned black grape that makes light-bodied, silky red wine, and is also pressed to make white and sparkling wine. It’s one of the oldest cultivated grape varieties in the world, the red grape of Burgundy and one of the core grapes of Champagne.

The name tells you what it looks like. “Pinot” comes from the French word for pine, because the tight little bunches are shaped like pine cones. “Noir” simply means black, after the colour of the skins.

Is Pinot Noir red or white?

Pinot Noir is red. It’s a black grape that makes a light red wine, but because its juice is clear, it can also be pressed gently and quickly to make white and sparkling wine without picking up colour from the skins. If you want the full story on how skins decide the colour, we’ve covered the differences between red and white wine separately.

It’s the same grape wherever it’s grown, but it’s unusually good at showing where it comes from. Pinot Noir from a warm Californian valley and Pinot Noir from a cool Yorkshire slope can taste like two different wines. That’s a big part of why people get so attached to it, and why we wanted to grow it here.

Why Pinot Noir is the hardest grape we grow

We’ll be honest: of everything we farm, Pinot Noir is the one most likely to give us a bad year.

Those thin skins are what give the wine its delicacy, but they also make the fruit fragile. The bunches grow tightly packed, which traps moisture between the berries, and in a damp English autumn that’s an open invitation to rot. Pinot Noir also buds early in spring, so a late frost can take out a chunk of the crop before the season has properly started.

Then there’s the picking window. Leave the fruit too long and you risk the weather turning and the skins splitting. Pick too early and you get sharp, green flavours that no amount of care in the winery will fix. Some years that window is a couple of weeks. Some years it’s a matter of days.

Yields are low even in a good season, and every bunch has to be handled with kid gloves to protect those delicate skins. As Tim puts it, “Pinot Noir is a labour of love.”

That’s the trade-off. A grape this fussy asks a lot of us, but when it works, it gives back something no easier variety can: a red wine with real finesse, grown a few miles from York.

Harvest day at Nun Monkton

Harvest doesn’t start with the secateurs. It starts weeks earlier, at veraison, when the green berries soften and turn from hard and sour to deep purple-black. From then on, we’re in the rows most days.
Making the call on when to pick is part science, part instinct. We take regular sugar and acid readings to see how ripe the fruit is getting, but we also just walk the rows and taste the berries. You’re looking for ripe, red-fruited flavour, soft skins and seeds that have turned from green to brown. And all the while, someone is refreshing the weather forecast. In Yorkshire, the forecast often has the final say.

When the day comes, everything is picked by hand. Machines would be quicker, but they’d also bruise and split fruit that we’ve spent all year protecting. The bunches go into small crates, never piled too deep, so the weight of the fruit on top doesn’t crush the fruit underneath. Anything that isn’t up to scratch is sorted out in the rows or on arrival, and the grapes go straight to the winery the same day, while they’re still cool and fresh.

When are grapes harvested in the UK?

In England, the grape harvest usually runs from late September through October, depending on how warm and dry the season has been. This year, we picked our Pinot Noir on September 23rd as we had a particularly mild start to Autumn. From the winery door, the fruit starts a whole new journey. If you’re curious about what happens next, we’ve walked through it step by step in from vine to wine.

Why cool climate changes the wine

Growing Pinot Noir in Yorkshire isn’t just harder than growing it somewhere warm. It makes a different wine.

In a cool climate, grapes ripen slowly. That long, gentle season lets the flavours build while the fruit holds on to its natural acidity, which is what gives a wine its freshness. Less intense sun also means less sugar in the grapes, and less sugar means lower alcohol. Our Pinot Noir sits at 11.0% ABV, noticeably lighter than a lot of New World Pinot Noir, which often comes in at 13.5% or more.

What you get is a red that’s fresher, more delicate and more aromatic, with bright red fruit rather than anything heavy or jammy. That’s exactly why so much of the interest in English red wine centres on Pinot Noir. It’s the grape best suited to what our climate does naturally, and it makes the kind of light red wine that’s easy to love.

It’s tempting to compare English Pinot Noir with Burgundy, and there are similarities: both are cool-climate, both prize elegance over power. But we’d rather not overclaim. A Yorkshire Pinot Noir isn’t trying to be a Burgundy, and it isn’t better or worse. It’s a different expression of the same grape, grown in a different place. We’ve written more about this in our honest take on English wine vs French wine.

What does English Pinot Noir taste like?

Pour a glass of our Pinot Noir and the first thing you’ll notice is the colour: a translucent ruby, light enough to see through. On the nose there’s raspberry, cherry and a hint of spice. In the mouth, it’s light, silky and bursting with wild strawberry, with soft tannins and a refreshing finish.

Tim deliberately keeps oak in the background, so the fruit does the talking. It’s a red wine for people who “don’t usually drink red”, and one that still gives wine lovers plenty to think about.

We’re not the only ones who think so. When Oz Clarke and Tom Surgey tasted it on camera in our vineyard for Oz & Tom’s English Wine Heroes 2026.

And, with a grin: “I think it’s so Yorkshire, isn’t it?”

We’re chuffed, and that’s before you count the Bronze it picked up at the WineGB Midlands & North Awards. The Wine Heroes 2026 book lands in October, so keep an eye out for it.