The Wine Blokes

Chardonnay is a green-skinned grape variety, used to make white wine. It probably originated in the Burgundy wine region of eastern France but is now found anywhere that grapevines can be grown, from England to New Zealand. It is vinified in many different styles, from the elegant, “flinty” wines of Chablis to rich, buttery Meursaults and New World wines bursting with tropical fruit flavours. It is an important component of many sparkling wines around the world, including Champagne.

Chardonnay is a versatile grape. In cold regions such as Chablis, it shows crisp acidity and flavours of green hay with the flinty notes typical of the terroir - the wine even has a green tinge. Just 100 miles south, in the Côte de Beaune, the white Burgundies are much riper and richer, reflecting warmer conditions and the increasing use of oak.

Chardonnay wines taste very different when the vines are grown in hot climates such as those in the plains of California and Australia. The conditions ensure ripe grapes, which lead to high levels of alcohol in the wine, and rich flavours of peach, melon, citrus and tropical fruits. In the 1980s and 1990s many New World winemakers responded to these bold flavours with equally bold use of oak, ageing the wine for long periods in new oak barrels. The cheap way to add “oakiness” would be the addition of staves or wood chips to wine in stainless steel containers. The intention was to impart complexity to the wines by introducing desirable aromas of vanilla, caramel, and butteriness. Too often the result tasted like chewing on a piece of wood, and this led to something of a consumer backlash against heavy, oaky Chardonnays. Winemakers in Australia and New Zealand reacted with completely unoaked Chardonnays from cooler climates, whereas in the United States there was more emphasis on controlling the oaking process. Thus they experimented with oak from different sources (French, American, Central European oaks all have different effects on wine), with different treatments (for instance toasting the barrels imparts smokiness and toast flavours) and reduced the oak influence by using bigger barrels (which have less oak per volume of wine), oaking only some of the wine in the blend, or using a mix of harsh new oak and older barrels.

Another difference between the US and the Antipodes is that in the former, winemakers favour the soft, rich flavours that result from malolactic fermentation. They deliberately inoculate the wine with lactic acid bacteria such as Oenococcus oeni that convert tart malic acid to the softer-tasting lactic acid. At the same time the yeast produce diacetyl, a diketone compound which imparts a buttery, butterscotch flavour to the wine. The recent concerns about the genotoxic effects of diketones used as food additives may be one reason for the trend away from “buttery” Chardonnays in Australia.

“Blanc de Blancs” is a term applied to sparkling wines made with 100% Chardonnay, including many in Champagne, but most of the best fizzes use the classic Champagne blend of Chardonnay with Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier to give toasty, appley flavours. Other common blending partners include Sémillon in Australia and Savagnin (Traminer) in the Jura, but it gets grown and blended with just about anything somewhere in the world. Chardonnay is typically sold as a single varietal wine, but such wines may be ‘bulked out’ with less famous varieties to some extent, depending on what is permitted by local labelling regulations.