Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - 39

Chardonnay
by Joshua Greene

Illustration by Siobhán Thomas-Bupphavesa

Chardonnay may be the most exciting white variety of the moment. It
was not five years ago, and definitely not ten.
Back then, it went through some dark moments. In
California, the trend was to drench the grape's ripe
fruit in butter and spice notes by fermenting it in new
oak barrels; in Burgundy, home of the most complex and long-lived wines made from chardonnay,
growers were having their own issues with wines that
began to oxidize after only a few years in collectors'
cellars.
As Jon Bonné wrote in W&S's April 2017 issue,
the crisis with chardonnay in Burgundy forced growers to reconsider every aspect of their work so that
today, on the whole, the wines are better than ever.
In the meantime, a number of top California growers
began to look to the legends of Chablis for inspiration, aiming to create lean, mineral-driven chardonnay, rather than the richer, riper wines of Montrachet
or Meursault, where they originally set their stylistic guideposts. While their versions will never be the
same as Chablis, by working with more neutral oak
and with better farming practices, they are creating
site-expressive wines.
Chardonnay, in fact, excels at translating the
details of a site. A naked version of chardonnay,
whether fermented in stainless steel, older oak,
ceramic eggs or glass, carries a message from the
place where it grew. In the limestone and clay soils
of Puligny, Chassagne and Meursault, that message is
clear enough to stand up to fermentation and aging
in new French oak barrels; in the limestone soils of
Chablis and the chalk of Champagne, that message
is often more delicate.
In the New World, where growers haven't had centuries to parse the differences in soils, climate defines
many of the variations in the wines. Chardonnay
grapes accumulate sugar quickly in a warm site, often

faster than they accumulate flavor detail, which can
lead to bland and blowsy wines. So chardonnay in
California has migrated toward the coast, where the
cooler temperatures ripen the grapes slower. Some of
its most compelling expressions are growing in cool
pockets west of Highway 101 in Sonoma County, or
on thin, scrappy soils in Santa Barbara County's Sta.
Rita Hills. In Oregon's Willamette Valley, growers
have been foraging for cooler sites and interesting
soils, creating a new crop of savory chardonnays with
deep orchard-fruit flavor.
But more than flavor, chardonnay's greatest asset
may be its texture, that elusive combination of factors translated from the grape skins, the yeasts that
fermented the wine, and something inherent in the
juice itself that allows chardonnay vines to create
some of the most compelling white wines on earth,
whether from Montrachet or Mesnil. Most people who have tasted a great vintage agree that the
satin abrasion of great Burgundy or Côte des Blancs
Champagne is like nothing else on earth.
As we tasted through the wines, Senior Editor Luke
Sykora, Tasting Coordinator Jenn Pries and I found
nuances in each one that we hadn't noticed before.
Sykora, who selected the initial set of wines, helped
as we fine-tuned the pathways, making sure that if
you like a particular wine and follow the arrow to
the next, you're pretty much guaranteed to like that
as well. "It's cool when it works in unexpected ways,"
he found, "like the Phelps and the albariño. That's
what's most interesting in this project-getting to
that third tier." Like following Chablis to assyrtiko,
or a coastal California chardonnay to an albariño:
Figure out what you like about a wine and you can
get all sorts of unexpected places.

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