My apologies to any of you who are Chardonnay fans. I’ve been maligning this grape for twenty years or so and it’s hard to drop such a satisfying habit. But this is not a pick on Chardonnay post! In the same vein as my recent “Perhaps Bordeaux is not terrible and I just don’t know when to drink it” revelation, I’m coming around on Chardonnay, or at least coming to understand why it is the way it is - or rather, why it is the ways it is, because I’ve discovered that Chardonnay can be many things.
Some years ago, I was with friends at a vineyard in Napa where we had booked a private tasting. As we arrived, they proudly presented each of us with a glass of their Chardonnay. We darted glances at one another, trying not to be rude but all obviously quite skeptical. One thing all of us agreed on is that we hated Chardonnay. But we politely took a sip, and I admit I was furtively looking for the spit buckets. Then we all looked back at each other in surprise. It was good!
Every Chardonnay I had before that moment had the heavily oaky and buttery flavors that made the varietal popular in the 80s and 90s but have made it fall out of favor more recently. This bottle was a bit creamy, but it also had a direct acidity to balance it, along with a distinct stony taste and mouthfeel that I have since learned to describe as “minerality.” They made a point of telling us their Chardonnay was made in steel rather than oak, to reduce the stereotypical oaky and buttery character.
It may be worth mentioning that all of my friends and I were utterly charmed by this winery and by our tasting in the middle of the vineyard on a gorgeous day, with a guide telling enchanting stories while plying us with many glasses of wine. We all joined the wine club, which is something you might find yourself doing the first couple of times you visit a wine region. But when I received that exceptional Chardonnay in my first shipment, it tasted…just like the other Chardonnays I had experienced. Oaky. Buttery. Gross. I wasn’t a member of that wine club very long.
Around that time I started noticing other wineries making a big deal about making their Chardonnay in steel rather than oak, so that it “doesn’t taste like other Chardonnays.” Except, it still did taste like other Chardonnays.
Something about Chardonnay has niggled at me since then. If the “oaky and buttery” character has gone out of favor, and it’s caused by oak, why not just eliminate the oak? If oak is at fault, why does Chardonnay made in steel still taste at least vaguely of room temperature milk? And I why do I, who am not at all opposed to creaminess, vanilla, or any of the other flavors you get from oak in other wines, hate it so much in Chardonnay?
Well, this summer after my Bordeaux enlightenment, I learned something about Chardonnay, and wine in general. The tartness in a grape comes mostly from malic acid, which converts during fermentation to lactic acid. This can happen naturally or it can be induced by introducing desirable bacteria, and sometimes occurs in a second fermentation and sometimes concurrently with the primary fermentation. In some wines, like Riesling and Gewürztraminer, the winemaker prevents this conversion to preserve the acidity.
Lactic acid has a richer, more dairy-adjacent taste than malic acid (makes sense, right?). In addition, malolactic fermentation gives a byproduct of diacetyl, which also has a buttery flavor - and diacetyl has an especially strong effect on the taste of Chardonnay.
In the California (and admittedly fairly low quality) Chardonnays I had been drinking, they rely heavily on malolactic fermentation to tone done the sharp natural acidity of the grape. They also generally age in oak, and in mass produced Chardonnay, they even put oak chips into the barrels to impart that expected oaky and buttery characteristic more quickly and cheaply.
Enter: Chablis. Also 100% Chardonnay, but a totally different creature. Crisp, tart, chalky in the best way. Just rounded enough not to slap you in the face with the acid. This is because they rarely use oak barrels, and even more rarely new barrels that impart a lot of vanilla. And while the majority of Chablis does go through malolactic fermentation, they are much less reliant on it. They’re trying to make the terroir and the grape primary, not the winemaking process variables. Needless to say, they’re probably not throwing oak chips into their wine.
In human behavioral studies, there’s a lot of discussion about nature vs. nurture. How much of personality is innate and biological, and how much is caused by upbringing and experience? How does the innate affect how we react and adapt to our circumstances? The same is true of wine. Wine is alive and always changing, and it exists and becomes through some mysterious combination of nature and nurture, through the characteristics of the grapes and the terroir, through the choices made by the winemaker, and by whatever happens in the barrel and bottle when the wine is left on its own to develop. Chardonnay, I have discovered, can be as varied as the people who make and drink it.
Want to learn more? My introduction to this new-to-me information about Chardonnay came through the ThirtyFifty Level 3 Wine Podcast, which is essentially a study aid for those preparing for the WSET Level 3 exam. I’m not doing that (yet), but I found the podcast and was so interested in the information that I kept listening. If you want an introduction to tasting method and some technical detail about winemaking that you might not normally find elsewhere, this is a good resource. I also found this article by Eric Asimov helpful as I fact-checked for this post.
I'm loving this! And, it's a science lesson, too. Thank you for sharing.
I think of myself as a low-level wine nerd and I confess that I hadn't really put together that Chablis was also a chardonnay grape. I really like a chablis in summer, it's perfect for all the things I like to eat in the summertime, lol.
I cannot wait to read your newsletter and become nerdy by proxy. :-)