The Winemaker's Wine

James Laube
Posted: August 28, 2003

California's greatest white wine -- or maybe its greatest wine, period -- is also by far its most misunderstood.

I'm talking about Chardonnay, of course, the ubiquitous great white that suddenly finds itself in a swirl of controversy, with a divided public that either loves it or hates it.

The granddaddy of whites is certainly fair game for critics. A wine that is this successful is bound to create envy and, in this instance, polarize the populace.

Still, there's no mistaking the fact that Chardonnay is the ultimate winemaker's wine and the one that helped popularize California wine in general. It's the vinous equivalent of giving a winemaker a blank canvas and a full palette of paints.

You see, Chardonnay is all about stylizing, which is why so many winemakers love the grape, and why, I suppose, so many of its detractors don't. They may point to the scores of cookie-cutter wannabes, which indeed are strikingly similar in style, and perhaps are even sweet or too woody. But at the top, California Chardonnays have never been better. They routinely qualify as rich, dramatic wines with uncommon complexity and depth. And here's another little secret: They can age amazingly well.

While Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon gave the wine world reason to think about California, Chardonnay has provided a much broader and sturdier foundation. Chardonnay grows so well in so many soils and climates that it helped anchor many California wineries in new and emerging regions, giving them not only a high quality product that consumers embraced, but simultaneously and conveniently, a much-needed cash cow.

Purists naturally scowl at the way Chardonnay is manipulated. But not those of us who lived through the "food wine" craze of the 1980s. Back then, winemakers were picking grapes at a lower sugar level (22 degrees Brix) and at higher acidities in the belief that they would create food-friendlier wines, à la Chablis. What we got instead was a steady diet of green, tart, underripe, gum-numbing curiosities. There is room for a Chablis style of Chardonnay from California, but those wineries that tried it were forced to drop it because consumers didn't understand it. Perhaps they never will.

Fortunately that craze was short-lived, and winemakers embraced the other Burgundian model -- best defined by Montrachet -- which in one form or another has been adopted by most of California's top producers. It is the style favored by the likes of Helen Turley, with her Marcassin offerings; Paul Hobbs, who taps vineyards in Napa, Sonoma and Carneros; and newcomer Mark Aubert of Aubert winery. He is a fan of Kistler Vineyards, one of the early advocates of Burgundian methodology, and one of Turley's disciples. It would have been easy, though, to name any number of other stars, because when it comes to rich, opulent, multidimensional Chardonnays, California's cup runneth over.

Turley has worked hard on building a better Chardonnay. Because the grape doesn't develop much flavor until it is teetering on overripe, it performs best in areas cool enough to retain the grape's acidity, yet warm enough to ripen it fully. Typically, that means vineyards planted in coastal sites or mountaintops. "Richness [in Chardonnay] comes from the vineyard," Turley says, "but finesse comes from the winemaking."

She and other winemakers coax their grapes along. They maintain tiny yields, cold-press the grapes, use natural yeasts, barrel-ferment, utilize malolactic fermentation techniques, stir the lees and avoid filtration. Making Chardonnay is similar to processing milk, explains Turley. "A decision is made at the barn door to make cheese or yogurt."

Oak is another issue, since so many winemakers barrel-ferment, mostly in new barrels. It's easy to overdo oak, admits Hobbs. But not all of the smoky, marshmallow and exotic scents are necessarily from oak; rather, some develop in the wine as it undergoes malolactic fermentation, which gives the wine a buttery character, he says. One way to allow some of that smoky character to blow off is to decant a young Chardonnay.

Many don't like Chardonnay's flavor. Others decry its sameness, or its oakiness. Or they pounce on the fact that it is, much like a circus dog, trained to jump through hoops and obey its commander's every whim. But that's why it inspires so many winemakers and has risen to such great heights in so brief a time.

James Laube, Wine Spectator's Napa Valley-based senior editor, has been with the magazine since 1983.