Wines Like Pinot Noir: 4 Underdogs for Pinot Lovers

Pinot Noir asks a lot of your wallet and gives back, often, a little less than it promised. The great ones are sublime. The affordable ones are frequently thin, sour, or dressed-up nothing. If you love what Pinot does — the perfume, the lightness on its feet, the way it flatters food instead of flattening it — the good news is that several lesser-known grapes do the same thing, and nobody has bid their prices up yet.

Here are four.

Mencía — the fragrant one

If your favorite thing about Pinot is the nose — violets, red fruit, a cool mineral lift — start here. Mencía, from Spain's Bierzo, is aromatic, fresh, and medium-bodied, with the same ability to smell like a garden and drink like a breeze. It is, bottle for bottle, one of the best values in red wine. Read the Mencía deep dive →

Schiava — the feather-light one

If you drink Pinot because you don't want to be clobbered, Schiava is even lighter — pale, low-tannin, faintly sweet-smelling of cotton candy and violets, and genuinely lovely with a slight chill. It's the most low-stakes red on this list and one of the most charming. Read the Schiava deep dive →

Trousseau — the cult one

If you've graduated to the natural-wine end of the Pinot shelf — the pale, savory, slightly wild bottles — Trousseau from the Jura is the one the geeks chase: light in color, big in aroma, earthy and red-fruited and alive. Harder to find, deeply rewarding when you do. Read the Trousseau deep dive →

Nerello Mascalese — the elegant one

And if what you love is high-altitude Pinot — tense, mineral, structured — Nerello Mascalese, grown on the slopes of Mount Etna, is the volcanic answer: pale, perfumed, firm, and unmistakably a wine of somewhere. The closest thing Italy has to red Burgundy's nerve. Read the Nerello Mascalese deep dive →

How to choose

Want perfume and value? Mencía. Want easy and light? Schiava. Want wild and cult? Trousseau. Want structure and minerality? Nerello Mascalese. Any one of them will give a Pinot lover something to love — usually for less than the Pinot would have cost.

Just getting into the overlooked grapes? Start with the Underdog Starter List — ten bottles under $25 worth chasing.