Chardonnay’s cachet ebbs and flows

The StarPhoenix, 16 Mar 2015, JAMES ROMANOW Dr. Booze

Remember the 1990s? When the future seemed full of email and cellphones and people actually believed Pets.com would make money? Remember drowning in Chardonnay at every bar and restaurant in town? Even lowbrow pizza joints would have one on the menu.

Like the dot.com bubble, Chardonnay of that era became ever more a caricature of what it was. People discovered malolactic fermentation (a.k.a. MLF, the conversion of hard-edged malic acid into the softer lactic acid) and exotic yeast strains that could make Chardonnay taste like pineapple juice mixed with butter. Chardonnay surfed on a tidal wave of popularity, eventually crashing against the beach of consumer fickleness.

This was followed by the unoaked frenzy, an attempt to reinstate fruit, to try to make Chardonnay taste more like wine again. Today, the tide has gone out, leaving Chardonnay a stalwart wine but bobbing more calmly in the shallows, largely ignored by today’s consumers pursuing the current craze for sweet wines. (Can you say Pinot Grigio or moscato?)

This lack of popularity is good news for those of us who view wine as food, not as a badge of wealth. The market is still a bit of a mess with some well-known and popular labels still producing overpriced plonk. However, it doesn’t take a lot of searching to find some wines that are ever so drinkable. In fact, after tasting a half dozen or so, I was surprised how uniform the palates have become. So uniform in fact that the only reason I picked this week’s Wine of the Week was it was a couple of bucks cheaper than the alternatives.

James Romanow Wine of the week

Torreon de Paredes is a small family winery operating out of Rengo, Chile. Their wines tend to follow the slightly conservative, Old World style that is common in Chile. And their Chardonnay Reserva is a fine pretender to the heritage of Chablis. Firstly, it is subtle. The wine changes profile ever so slightly and gently as the temperature shifts. There is a touch of oak here, and if you leave the wine open on the counter overnight you’ll start to approach that mid-palate and buttery flavour so beloved by some people. However, it never gets out of control.

If you drink the wine at fridge temp, five degrees, the grapefruit astringency flavours (which I adore) predominate.

But if you serve it warmer, around 10 degrees, which I recommend, you will start to get the delicate citrus flower and lemon bouquet and a more balanced wine.

Oyster Bay, a reliable New Zealand label, was remarkably similar. The oak flavours were a bit less pronounced, and the wine just a wee bit better structured. It was my favourite of the tasting but it’s $3 or 17 per cent more. That’s not enough to deter me, but I’m sure there are folks out there for whom it makes more of a difference.

Sandhill is a Canadian winery that is both innovative and reliable. It suffers in this tasting by being six months younger as a Northern Hemisphere wine. This makes the freshness and fruit flavours a bit more assertive than in the other two wines.

I loved the astringency of this wine when served cold, that zesty, snappy mid-palate set of flavours that just seem to cry out for stir-fried vegetables.

You won’t go wrong with any of these wines.