People Loving Chardonnay
The
idea even seems a bit quaint. Having recently sat on a blind
tasting panel composed mainly of sommeliers from around the
world, I can report that it’s not a popular grape among many
of the young guns in the field. Not that anyone comes out
and actually says they don’t like it, mind you. That would
be closed-minded. Instead you’ll likely hear declamations
against “over-oaked” Chardonnay, “high alcohol” Chardonnay,
“unbalanced” Chardonnay, “pretentious” Chardonnay,
“egotistical” Chardonnay, sometimes even “California”
Chardonnay. If it weren’t so funny it would get tiresome.
Upon finding out that they were assigned to taste flights of
Chardonnay from the US, many of the panels let out a
collective groan. “What did we do to deserve this?” one of
my twenty-something colleagues asked. “You should have been
around fifteen years ago,” I told this European whiz kid.
“Then you would have seen some serious oak,
Jacques.”
Maybe it’s my
contrarian nature but I’m coming back around to Chardonnay.
Not that I ever really left, but I do think that many of the
wines I’m tasting today, in all price and style categories,
are outstanding. At the international tasting I certainly
felt compelled to defend what I thought were superior
quality wines that others kept disparaging, even if they
weren’t exactly my style. “Why do you think this grape is
still so damn popular?” I finally had to ask a dinner
companion who was frothing with rage at the mere mention of
one of the more commercially (and critically) successful
forty-dollar retail Chardonnay brands. “Marketing,” he said,
as though I were an idiot, which granting him the benefit of
the doubt I may well in fact be. “So people don’t really
like it,” I asked, seeking enlightenment, “they’re just
fooled into liking it?” He just looked at me like even
trying to explain this was beneath him. But I pressed on:
“Do you think it’s possible that you don’t like it,” I
asked, “because when customers order it, or other
Chardonnays of this type, you don’t really have anything to
talk to them about?”
That, I am
beginning to believe, may be it in a nutshell. Being the
overwhelming white wine choice of the masses, as well as the
well-heeled classes, Chardonnay’s very popularity works
against it when it comes to some restaurant people (or some
retailers, for that matter) who are eager to share their
latest obscure passion with customers. The attitude is, ‘How
dare these bozos waste their money on this superficial bimbo
of a wine when there are so many intriguing choices I could
tell them about?’ I have to disagree. Professional wine
buyers constitute a special coddled breed of humanity, their
palates romanced with all kinds of exotic flavors on a daily
basis. Marketers of all kinds are in frenzied competition to
titillate their highly evolved, often-idiosyncratic tastes.
It takes a really electrifying story to spark some of these
people’s jaded imaginations. While there is a miniscule
proportion of the wine drinking public who aspire to be in
the wine industry so that they can participate in these
arcane rituals of sniff-taste-gurgle-spit-and purchase, for
most of the rest, there is Chardonnay. No doubt some of the
people who buy it do so out of habit, because they’re
comfortable with the way the name sounds when it rolls off
their tongue, but many of the others know exactly what
they’re getting when they choose a Chardonnay, because
they’ve learned through experience that the flavors and
textures and aromas are pleasing to them. In other words, I
think it’s a really popular wine because people like it.
Radical thought, perhaps, but to believe otherwise is to
lapse into the Homer Simpson position: “Everyone’s stupid
but me.”
But here I go
talking about “Chardonnay” as though it actually were one
thing. Among the grape’s most magical attributes is its
protean nature. In reality there’s a Chardonnay to fit every
taste and palate. The range is quite dramatic: bone dry to
frankly sweet, acidic to mild, lavish to lean, toasty to
fruity, light to medium to full. Respecting its market
leadership position as the number one, two and three most
popular white wines rolled into one, I have been blind
tasting like crazy lately to unearth the crème de la
crème, in several of these different categories, and
here is what I’ve discovered: it’s not hard to make a good
wine. Outstanding ones are fewer and far between. The
following, in my estimation, deserve that accolade. They are
listed in ascending order of ranking, without consideration
of cost. (For comparative purposes, prices quoted are
average retail.)
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Graham Thelema Alois Silverado Yalumba Travis Neyers |
