It’s Not all Just Chardonnay

Ok, enough’s enough. I thought we were well beyond this sort of thing. If I sit at another restaurant table this month with somebody who politely informs me while choosing a wine that they’ve sworn off chardonnay for life I shall have little choice but to break a magnum of Leeuwin Estate Art Series over their head. Yes, it’s fun to drink good riesling, mature Hunter semillon has always been an under-rated pleasure, marsanne makes a nice change and viognier shows some potential. But with only a few exceptions, Australia’s best white wines are still made from the chardonnay grape, like it or not.

With all the bad press that chardonnay has received over the last two years it’s little wonder that people might be turning away from it. So many restaurant lists are choked with ordinary, lumpy, brassy chardonnay without any pretension to style or quality. Wine stores are lined with endless aisles of cut chardonnay cases, marching into the distance like the railway tracks across the Nullabor. Chardonnay is even back inside the modern equivalent of the goatskin, the wine cask. Much Australian chardonnay is bad chardonnay, poorly made to a winemaking budget to fit onto a shelf or a list for a price.

The most boring day in my working life is to face up to about a hundred chardonnays priced between $6 and $14, for the soul-destroying sameness and monotony of so many eats away at my very enthusiasm for wine. Frankly, I would rather watch England play cricket.

So why do I rise in chardonnay’s defence? Because there is chardonnay and there is chardonnay and it’s certainly not fair to lump it all in the same boat; that’s why. When these new-age arbiters of modern taste take the cheap shots they do, they simply ignore the great wines of so many makers of excellent chardonnay, from Pierro to Petaluma, Bannockburn to Rosemount, Giaconda to Leeuwin Estate. Sure, some of these wines are getting excessively expensive to drink regularly, but so are the best shirazes and cabernets. But who is telling you not to drink shiraz any more?

You can roughly divide all Australian chardonnay into four types of wine. First is that cost-driven anathema of unwooded chardonnay, which owes its existence in this country to the fact that good oak casks are very expensive for winemakers to buy and because dozens of small growers and makers planted chardonnay without realising the first thing about how expensive it was to grow or to make properly.

Then we were treated to the marketing hype about how unwooded chardonnay was the logical solution to the phenomenon of over-oaked chardonnay when the overwhelming bulk of the product is simply forward, juicy, angular, oily and coarse, lacks length and finish and has an overwhelming butyric characteristic which recent experience suggests bears an alarming similarity to the regurgitations of newly-born infants.

There’s a small and exclusive number of decent Australian unwooded chardonnays, but I’d still prefer a half-decent riesling to any of them.

How people actually enjoy the stuff is beyond me, but the last glut of chardonnay on the market has since seen virtually every Australian wine company of any size and significance produce an unwooded chardonnay. My message is simple: do not confuse this with the real thing for, with the exception of good vintages of cru Chablis, chardonnay needs oak like Sydney needs a new airport.

The most common type of Australian chardonnay is that made for early, if not immediate consumption and sells between $6 and $12. It’s simple, straightforward, soft and fruity, very approachable and usually generous. It’s usually given some expression of oak character, although only rarely as the result of maturation inside an oak cask. Many are too oaky, hence the immediate, if not entirely logical attraction to many of unwooded chardonnay. These wines are made with what several makers of superior chardonnay look down their noses at and describe as ‘methode industrielle’. They have a point, but people are buying this stuff like there’s no tomorrow.

The next level of chardonnay actually has some aspects of genuine chardonnay complexity. Understanding that chardonnay is a grape that needs to be built upon in the winery rather than simply be converted directly into uninteresting wine, makers of these wines introduce different winemaking techniques to enhance the flavour, texture and length of chardonnay. These might involve some elements of the wine experiencing barrel fermentation, malolactic fermentation, lees contact and stirring in the barrels. The results resemble classic chardonnay and can offer some delicious drinking at an affordable price.

The only problem is that while there are many chardonnays that would purport to represent this style, priced mainly between $15 and $25, there are actually very few I would recommend. In truth there is a paucity of good chardonnay in this price range, since most are either over-influenced by the sort of winemaking artefacts I have described, or are simply made from fruit whose high cropping levels means there is insufficient concentration of flavour to handle such winemaking treatments.

The premier level of chardonnay, and the level which initiated this perspective, is the unashamedly Burgundy-influenced style influenced by an approach which pre-dates the Industrial Revolution by centuries and crafted with painstaking and hands-on attention to detail. These wines are usually 100 fermented in barrel, sometimes with wild yeast species, are given the full benefit of lees contact and some degree of malolactic fermentation and are often handled with very low levels of preservative.

The point about these chardonnays is found in their concentration of flavour and their textures that range between the sumptuous and fleshy and the tight, minerally and flinty. The best examples from cooler climates such as the Adelaide Hills, Mornington Peninsula and Tasmania are more restrained in fruit expression, tauter and racier in their acidity, yet they can reveal surprising intensity and depth of flavour. Slightly warmer regions such as the Yarra Valley and Margaret River fashion rounder, plumper wines into which winemakers can introduce significant complexity through the myriad of techniques available to them. Faster to mature but occasionally even richer and more opulent are the best Hunter Valley chardonnays, which can reveal pronounced figgy, tobacco and melon fruit.

My tip concerning chardonnay is that for everyday drinking I’d be looking at the so-called ‘cheap’ category I have introduced, since there’s more value in that price range than immediately above. Secondly, if it’s real chardonnay you want to drink, get one of the more serious wines. And that’s the chardonnay to use as your future yardstick.

Unwooded

Chapel Hill
David Wynn
Shaw and Smith

Cheap

Cockatoo Ridge
Deen de Bortoli
Lindemans Bin 65
Orlando Jacob’s Creek

More Interesting

Gulf Station
Leasingham Bin 37
Lindemans Padthaway
Orlando St Hilary
Seppelt Sunday Creek

Premier

Bannockburn
Giaconda
Leeuwin Estate
Petaluma
Pierro Please login to post comment