Chardonnay Guide

A Lasting Impression

When I told my youngest daughter, the budding wine enthusiast, that I was doing a column on Chardonnay, she said, "I hate Chardonnay." I thought about her comment frequently as I tasted my way through a few dozen wines trying to find some bargains among those made from what is arguably the world's greatest white wine grape.

Why would a person with a keen and sophisticated, if relatively inexperienced, palate actually think she "hates" Chardonnay? She certainly can't hate the great white Burgundies. She can't hate the best wines of Chablis or the spectacular stars of Champagne or the best Chardonnay efforts of winemakers in at least a dozen other regions. She just doesn't know them. She can't afford them. And friends and relatives, like her father, haven't shared enough of the great ones to make a lasting impression. So, like most of the world, she's been left to search the markets for that elusive species: good, affordable Chardonnay. Oy!

 

As I tasted those few dozen inexpensive wines from different regions in France, Italy, Chile, South Africa, New Zealand, Argentina, Israel, Australia and the United States, I came to understand her bias better. There is a lot of nasty Chardonnay around. Bitter, smoky, over-oaked, astringent, innocuous, grassy, soapy, sweet and insignificant -- those were some of the adjectives I found in my notes. This tasting was done in several different sittings over a couple of weeks. Most of the wines eventually selected as GWBs were tasted in two consecutive sittings, meaning that I had a few really bad days, which seemed either a statistical anomaly or a terminal case of palate droop. So I broke out a couple of my great Chardonnays just to make sure my palate wasn't broken. Nope. Most of the wines were still awful, except for my cellar treasures, which were, well, treasures (with price tags to match, of course).

Why do we get this kind of variation in Chardonnay, from breathtakingly beautiful nectar to dreadful swill? I suspect there are two primary reasons. First, there is too much production, by too many people in too many places. Everyone feels they must make Chardonnay and that they can. So you have lots of grapes being grown in places not suitable for them by people who don't know enough to grow the grapes or make the wine well. Second, it is the nature of Chardonnay to be malleable. It is a wine that can be artistically shaped by great winemakers and manhandled by those who aren't. Note that half the wines we chose were unoaked. This could be palate bias -- I just happen to like fresh, lighter wines after tasting dozens of heavy ones. But, it could also be that oak aging requires quality time and attention that most winemakers can't afford to spend on wines in this price range.