La Crema Monterey Pinot Gris California White Wine

Pinot Gris and Pinot Grigio are two names for the same white grape; the wording often signals a style choice rather than a different vine. In our September 2026 checks this bottle ranged from $16.99 to $28.99, depending on the store.

6 shoppers have rated it, averaging 4.67 out of five, which runs just under the 4.71 median for the wines we cover. On taste, official guides put Pinot Gris and Pinot Grigio in the same family of flavors, pear, apple, citrus and stone fruit, and note that the Gris wording can point to more body and texture, where Grigio leans lighter and crisper.

By its own account, La Crema was founded in 1979 in Sonoma County's Russian River Valley, and it is now part of Jackson Family Wines. Monterey is where this fruit is grown, and the county is a broad one, cool and fog-touched near the bay in the north and considerably warmer in its southern valleys, so a Monterey label points to a general area more than a single patch of ground.

For a firmer read on where it grew, a shopper would want a name narrower than the county: a federally defined growing area, called an AVA, or a single vineyard. Our data does not record either for this bottle. The highest shelf price in our September 2026 checks was $28.99.

Monterey's winegrowing history reaches back to 1771, when Franciscan friars at the Spanish mission of Soledad planted the county's first wine grapes, a producer account of the region says; today the region spans 40,000 vineyard acres across ten sub-appellations between the Santa Lucia and Gabilan mountains, cooled by winds off a deep offshore trench the producer calls the Blue Grand Canyon, the mechanism behind the bright acidity the label promises. La Crema's own technical sheet lists this wine at 13.5 percent alcohol and gives the appellation as Central Coast, an AVA broad enough to hold Monterey County inside it rather than narrow it, and notes the winery is Certified California Sustainable. On taste, the producer's sheet and a retailer's description do not fully agree: one leads with white peach, lemon and tropical fruit, the other with ripe pears, green apples and honeysuckle, two attributed reads on the same bottle.

Our call: worth trying if a stated sustainability practice and a documented growing-region story matter to you; La Crema names this fruit Certified California Sustainable and traces the region's own winegrowing history to 1771. Pass if the crowd's read is what you weigh most; the shoppers who have rated it have settled just under the median for the wines we track, and the label still stops at a county-wide appellation rather than a single vineyard or narrower AVA.

The Grocery Store Wine Desk · written Sep 16, 2026 from our research file for this wine. Numbers reflect our latest checks.