Wall Street Journal Guide to Wine New and Improved

Chapter One Chardonnay America's Third Ocean Spring Mountain Chardonnay 1976. Delicious! Huge, yet crisp, but also soft and very creamy, filling mouth with big creamy taste. Very complex, with contradictory tastes. Lots of pepper. Very much a Chardonnay. Cuvaison Chardonnay 1978. Delicious. Classic Chardonnay nose, very buttery. Green-gold. Half alcohol and half butter, huge and plump. Massive aftertaste comes back up and gets you. Thick yet clean, a little wood but not overwhelming wood. Knocks your socks off. Guenoc Chardonnay 1980. Delicious! Big and rich and creamy, filled with sunshine and butter. Long finish of nutmeg and wood. Kistler Chardonnay 1980. Delicious, but shocking in its bigness. Massive and oaky. Long oak finish. Powerful, chewy, very American. Ah, the Chardonnay of our youth. "Powerful, chewy, very American"--those words from our notes back then said it all. Chardonnay has been the world's greatest white-wine grape for centuries. It is, after all, the grape of the famous white Burgundies of France. In the 1970s, California winemakers discovered just what was possible with this grape in the New World. They took the big, superripe grapes provided by California's perfect weather, then fermented and aged them in oak barrels and produced wines that offered a uniquely American taste and, in a sense, a reflection of the American character: bold, unrestrained, and outsized. We look back on those chewy Chardonnays with the affection of a first crush. As it happens, we fell in love with Chardonnay at about the same time the rest of the country did. Chardonnay became America's sweetheart. Americans now drink about 400 million bottles of Chardonnay a year. It is far and away the country's most popular "varietal" wine--that is, a wine named after its grape. America became a nation of three oceans: the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Chardonnay. This is both good and bad. Let's get to the good part first: Chardonnay can be a terrific wine, soul-satisfying and just plain delicious. We--and, we'd guess, most wine lovers--have had more great experiences with Chardonnay-based wines than with any other white. Not only that, but if you enjoy Chardonnay, there's no reason to settle for a simple "glass of white wine." There are excellent, flavorful Chardonnays out there, some of them remarkably inexpensive. And some expensive Chardonnays still have the kind of character, class, breeding, and personality--even the drama--of the Chardonnays we first fell for. What does a fine California Chardonnay taste like to us? It's big, rich, ripe, and buttery. It's mouthfilling, so you have to take small sips. It has a little bit of toastiness, vanilla, maybe some butterscotch and some cream, and it's almost chewy. Sometimes your nose can pick up hints of fruit--grapefruit or pineapple. Its tastes are broad, rather than focused and sharp, with maybe a hint of oiliness, which doesn't sound so good but adds texture and complexity. The very best Chardonnays have all of this power going on in your mouth, but when you swallow, something miraculous happens. The finish is a clean, light one that lingers for several minutes, like the essence of plump, sweet grapes. Now that is Chardonnay. But now the bad news. As America's affair with Chardonnay grew, wineries began producing a great deal of yucky Chardonnay. ("Yucky" is one of those highly technical wine terms that we will use throughout this book.) The recipe is easy. Get some second-rate vineyard land with plenty of sun. Let the vines grow and grow and don't prune back much, which will leave you with plenty of grapes but little flavor. (Imagine that every vine has only so much flavor in it. The fewer the grapes, the more flavor each grape has.) Let them get overripe, which produces a great deal of sugar--and, later, alcohol--but breaks down acids, leaving the wine simple and flabby.Gaiter, Dorothy J. is the author of 'Wall Street Journal Guide to Wine New and Improved', published 2002 under ISBN 9780767908146 and ISBN 0767908147.