If you have read the Pinot Noir guide here, you already know the grape’s nature: thin-skinned, high in acid, delicate, more interested in showing you a place than flavouring it. This week is about what happens when you take that one honest grape and grow it in three different climates. The grape barely changes. Everything around it does.

Start in Burgundy, the grape’s home, where centuries of practice meet a cool continental climate. The wines are about earth and structure as much as fruit, savory and mineral, built to age. That is the benchmark every other Pinot is quietly measured against.

Cross an ocean and warm the climate, and you arrive at California’s Russian River. Here Pinot ripens fully and generously: plush red fruit, rounder texture, more obvious charm. The same grape, speaking more loudly and more sweetly. We tasted it a few weeks ago, and the link is below.

Now come north to Oregon, where the climate cools again, closer to Burgundy’s margins than to California’s warmth. The fruit pulls back. The earth steps forward. Red cherry over forest floor, bright acid, fine and gentle tannins. Restraint, not generosity. In spirit, it is the New World’s answer to Burgundy.

Same grape, three times. Burgundy gives you earth and structure. California gives you fruit and generosity. Oregon gives you the savory middle, cool and earth-driven. None of them is the real Pinot Noir, because all of them are. The grape is a mirror, and what you see in it is the place.

Which is why, when you sit down with an Oregon Pinot and a plate of mushrooms on Thursday, the match is not a coincidence. The wine smells like the woods because it grew somewhere cool and earthen. The food is the woods on a plate. We will get there.