Deep Dive into Chardonnay: A Matter of Style

Grown nearly everywhere, Chardonnay is the most widely planted white wine grape on the planet. The range of planting and growing conditions provides only a partial explanation of the diversity of Chardonnay styles.

When winemakers talk about their approach with any other grape, they describe hands-off, minimal intervention philosophies, and letting the wine make itself. In describing a process of nurturing identity and potential, they sound more like Montessori School teachers than technicians.

If you ever get a winemaker to tell you the truth about how they make Chardonnay, you’ll get a philosophy more akin to a drill sergeant or high school football coach. The raw materials demand discipline and molding.

A Riesling or Pinot Noir that bears the marks of the winemaker’s effort will be spoken about critically.

But a Chardonnay that doesn’t show those marks won’t be talked about at all.

With Chardonnay, the winemaker isn’t to blame. It isn’t that the raw materials don’t have the essential qualities for greatness. It’s that, like DaVinci’s David, those qualities are obscured and must be liberated. If winemaking were reality television, Chardonnay would be a makeover show. Yes, a vineyard might produce appealing fruit, but the winemaker must choose a style that truly flatters and highlights their best attributes.

Chardonnay’s malleability has led to abuses. Harvesting riper fruit, fermentation and aging in new oak barrels, malolactic fermentation, and lees stirring created a style that enjoyed enormous critical and commercial success. As is often the case, a doctrine of “if a little bit is good, more is better” came to dominate the making of Chardonnay. The resulting wines weren’t refined portraits of impeccable detail and balance. They were carnival caricature sketches, with the defining features of butter and oak exaggerated and distorted.

But the pendulum swings. In a recoil to the horror of the excess, winemakers began turning to Chardonnays made without any oak influence, malolactic fermentation, or lees stirring. The result? Basic white wine. Though drinkable, they resemble the Makeovers show’s subject before the hosts work their magic.  Nothing noteworthy or remarkable enough to hold one’s attention.

The oak pendulum has begun to slow. Rare is the Chardonnay aged in a new oak barrel for a year followed by another year in a newer barrel. Almost as rare are the stainless-steel Chardonnays.

In addition to oak, the other great excess of Chardonnay was ripeness. Letting the grapes hang for an extended period pushed flavor profiles into the spectrum of sweet fruits; sweet apple, pear, and even fresh green fig. Acid and energy dissipated and though the wines lacked definition and tension, they took on dense, thick mouthfeels. A style more reminiscent of red wines and often lauded by critics.

As America began to take food more seriously, it also began to demand wines more complementary to foods. At the same time, Gen X was rejecting the Boomer’s status quo wine options including heavy, oily, sweet chardonnay.

Inspired by white Burgundy, winemakers were soon in pursuit of tension and precision. Acidity - the more, the better - became the variable in determining picking decisions. In pursuit of still more tension and structure, some producers macerated the grapes before pressing to extract tannins in a way similar to red wine production.

The attention of the critics began to move away from warmer locals to cooler. Napa and Russian River lost the headlines in favor of wines from the sea brushed Sonoma Coast and Anderson Valley and the more northern Willamette Valley.

The pendulum is just reaching the extreme of that arc. Though the Chardonnays of France’s Burgundy region are to be admired, they cannot be reproduced. The genetics of the grapevine can be exported to six of the seven continents but what is quintessential Burgundy cannot. The line between inspiration and imitation is thin and far from clear.

The interplay of the push winemakers must exert on Chardonnays and the essential nature of the raw materials as a function of specific geology and geography give rise to the enormous diversity of Chardonnay styles.

Good Chardonnay, much less great, demands a winemaker with a vision.

Exceptional Chardonnay is nearly always pushed to a precipice of some sort. Alone, vision will get you to that edge. However, its experience and technical prowess that keep the wine from going over. The particulars of the influence the winemaker exerts on Chardonnay, in the best examples, are proportionate to the inherent qualities of the fruit itself. The winemaker in Australia’s Margaret River, for instance, will likely make radically different decisions, in method and degree, than one working with fruit from Oregon’s Willamette Valley or California’s Anderson Valley.

This is mixed news for the consumer. The resulting diversity means that there is a Chardonnay for every drinker and occasion. The label Chardonnay, however, does little to communicate a bottle’s suitability to either the drinker or occasion. The different approach to making Chardonnay might suggest that it also demands a slightly different approach to enjoyment. You may find that the style of Chardonnay you are attracted to has more to the winemaker’s approach than where the grape is grown, or even the grape itself.