Surprise! The world's most
well-known white wine comes in a wide range of
styles.
It's easy to swear off chardonnay. There are countless
weak 
In Depth: Chardonnays You Won’t
Hate
Spend a little more money and a
lot more time experimenting, however, and you'll find that when
it's made with some TLC, chardonnay comes in several different
styles and flavors--and there's joy to be found in discovering
which suit your palate best.
Take, for example, a brief
taste test conducted in Forbes' New York office. Three
chardonnays--Joseph Drouhin Chablis 2005; Deux Montille Mersault
2004; and Diatom 2007 from California's Sta. Rita Hills, all
used in our video with Robert Bohr, wine director at Manhattan
restaurant Cru--were poured and served blind, one at a time.
It wasn't until the
third wine, the Diatom--which has a wide range of citrus and melon
fruit characters, pronounced oak treatment and a firm bite of
alcohol--that anyone in the room knew for sure that they were
drinking chardonnay. The first two wines, both from France's
Burgundy region, were much more subtle, crisp with nice
acidity--though the Mersault was a bit richer, as is common for
that particular appellation, with more honey notes and only a hint
of oak. 
The larger point was made, however, that three
chardonnays made of grapes grown in three different places resulted
in three completely different-tasting wines. All had unique
characters and flavors, and were nothing like your run-of-the-mill
$8 chardonnay off the store shelf. It's worth noting too that
those tasting the wines were split relatively evenly across all
three as to which they liked best.
The downside to exploring
high-quality chardonnay, unfortunately, is that it tends to be one
of those wine varieties with which cost can make a big difference.
The bargain-priced bottles will deliver pretty much what you ask
for: cheap white wine. There's no guarantee, of course, that
expensive chardonnays will deliver on character or quality--they
may turn out to be more oaky than anything. But moving beyond
blandness pretty much always comes with a price.
That's where your local
wine shop will come in handy. Tell them what other kinds of wines
you like, and they'll point you in the right direction. If you
tend to like crisp, acidic sauvignon blancs, unoaked chardonnays
from Chablis are likely to be up your alley. If you tend to like
big, oaky wines, look to California. If you're somewhere in the
middle, several producers in Burgundy might fit the bill, as could
wines from New Zealand or Australia.
If you still haven't
found a wine you like, toast the end of your chardonnay educational
experience with a tall, cool glass of champagne--any blanc de blanc
will do. After all, who doesn't like champagne?
While you're drinking
it, just try and forget that it's made of chardonnay too.
In Depth: Chardonnays You Won’t
Hate
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Food
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Chardonnays You Won't Hate
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