Pinot Meunier, may be France’s tenth most planted black grape variety but it is rarely encountered on a wine label. Pinot Meunier, sometimes called simply Meunier in the champagne region where almost all of its French total of more than 11,000 ha/27,170 acres is grown, is an early, particularly downy, mutation of pinot noir. It earns its name (meunier is French for miller) because the underside of its downy leaves can look as though they have been dusted with flour. In Germany, it is known as Müllerrebe (miller’s grape) as well, misleadingly, as Schwarzriesling.
