The Judgment of Napa: the Chardonnays and results

Read more on The Judgment of Napa:

The first day of celebrations PLUS Results of the Cabernet Sauvignon blind tasting

The first day of the The Judgment of Napa paid tribute – through speeches and presentations – to Patricia Gallagher, Steven Spurrier and George Taber who organised and wrote about The Judgment of Paris.

The second day paid tribute to those three wine musketeers through a blind tasting of Chardonnays and Cabernet Sauvignons in homage to the event 45 years earlier that catapulted California wine onto the world stage.

The comparison they masterminded in 1976 challenged the myth of supremacy and gave premium wine producers the world over the gumption to pit their wares against the established greats. It was this extraordinary legacy that we celebrated, for the first time, in Napa.

Conceived and presented by Angela Duerr and her Cultured Vine team, The Judgment of Napa tastings were staged at Charles Krug Winery on 6 October 2021.

Scroll down for tasting notes and scores of the 10 Chardonnays at Judgment of Napa

And what a celebration! We stepped into the darkened barrel cellar thumping with club music. The smoke from dry ice billowed around our feet, while a giant glitter ball flashed off the hundreds of Riedel glasses set up at the trestle tasting tables.

Electric, joyful and exciting, clearly this was to be unlike any other wine judging I’d ever done. I was privileged to have a seat on the Expert Panel with Andrea Robinson MS, Alder Yarrow, Virginie Boone, Susan Lin MW, Karen MacNeil and Patrick Comiskey.

We watched a procession of sommeliers bring out and pour our first flight of 10 Chardonnays from the 2018 vintage. It was then I started to feel nervous. No matter how many years I’ve been doing this and how many thousands of wines I’ve tasted blind, performance stress is real. And this felt like a performance.

The wines had been curated by Master of Wine Peter Marks. I know Peter well from pursuing my MW in Napa. He’s an extraordinary and scrupulous taster, winner of the Bollinger Award for excellence in tasting. He’s a mentor to all of us who believe in the intrinsic value of tasting wines blind to reveal both their true nature and our own true weaknesses.

I knew we’d be in for a treat and that the wines would be stellar examples of their provenance, as well as the epitome of their winemaking craft. We were given no clues, simply that they were not necessarily all from France and California – as had been the case 45 years ago in Paris.

The tasting

The glasses were lettered A to J, we had small score cards for minimal tasting notes and were asked to rank them 1 to 10. We were given 22 minutes to do so, accompanied by a persistent beating musical background.

So where do you start? Each taster tackled it differently, I’m sure, which is essential to the nature of mass judging to find consensus. I combined the way I’ve tackled years of MW study with the way I’ve practiced years of wine buying. I stepped in towards the wines as a sleuth, stepping back from them as a drinking customer.

Knowing they were all 2018 Chardonnays and knowing they would be special, I nosed them all first. I notated aromatic traits that might suggest their winemaking treatments and their provenance (oak treatment, malolactic fermentation, expressive development, ripeness, fruit quality etc… )

This, I trusted, would begin ‘the flow’ process of blind tasting: that trigger required to distance you from your physical surroundings and start the broadening mind-mapping process that unearths the clues to a wine’s quality hierarchy as well as the point it has reached in its evolution and its origins.

Then I started with Wine A and worked alphabetically through to Wine J, tasting each twice, making notes as I went. Once I’d tasted them all, I went back through my notes and prized out my top five. I retasted those and tried to rank them fairly.

Tasting the Judgment of Napa Chardonnays

What did I find overall? Well, it confirmed what I’ve always felt about Chardonnay – that it’s a beast to taste blind. Of all the white varieties, Chardonnay is one that the world’s best winemakers have almost mastered, and tamed, completely. In the taming, there inevitably comes restraint – a word I used to describe five of the wines out of the 10.

Restraint is also often correlated with quality. The world’s finest Chardonnays rarely sing on first pour or sip but take time to stretch their sinewy structure and backbone of acidity in the glass. The 22 minutes to evaluate 10 such wines was never going to be enough time to fully appreciate their beauty.

Restraint and certain winemaking techniques can also lead to uniformity, however. It is not as easy today, as it perhaps was years ago, to tell an Australian from a Californian from a French. The elements of premium-quality Chardonnay have become more universally acknowledged and emulated.

But was I really interested in exploring their provenance and ‘nailing’ their origin? What did that fundamentally have to do with the ranking I was tasked with giving them? Would it in fact reveal my bias if I identified the Burgundies, or the Californians, then placed them first or last?

I concentrated therefore on intrinsic quality or the famous BLICCT acronym (Balance, Length, Intensity, Complexity, Character, Typicity) that we students are so fond of. And finally, the question I asked myself was which wine would I want to spend the longest time with as my companion.

Final assessment and the results

I looked back at my notes and decided that the wine I wrote the most about, with the least clarity in such a short space of time allowed, its sheer quality belittling my ability to describe it adequately, would be my number one. I then ranked them accordingly and breathed a sigh of relief. My performance was over, temporarily at least, before the reveal and the afternoon’s panel discussion and Cabernet flight.

As the scorecards were collected from around the cellar and the rankings collated, I had a few moments to simply sit and savour the 10 wines that were only just beginning to take flight and deliver their deliciousness to the drinker.

The results of our Judgment of Napa Chardonnays tasting were of course fascinating and hotly anticipated. The noise in the cellar increased steadily as the wines were revealed by ranking in ascending order (see box below).

There was, however, a distinct drop in noise level to a hushed murmur – not quite a stunned silence but close – when the overall winner from both our Expert Panel and the Event Panel (those who bought tickets for the event) was revealed. It was Wine G, Leeuwin Estate’s Art Series Chardonnay from Margaret River in Western Australia.

A delicious echo, perhaps, from that day 45 years ago when Chateau Montelena beat top-notch Burgundy to claim the winning spot. How fitting that another relative newcomer should wow the palates and challenge the status quo, and how fitting that this time it would be done in the heart of California.

Intrinsic quality revealed

For what it’s worth, I had placed the Leeuwin as my fourth pick, admiring its fruit purity. My personal number one was Wine J – Aubert Wines’ CIX Chardonnay from the Sonoma Coast: a Californian beauty made by a team who had been tutored by a Burgundian legend. I loved its intensity which I matched with Wine H, Hudson’s Seashell from Carneros. I equally loved its restraint, which I linked to Wine B, Ramonet’s Bâtard-Montrachet Grand Cru which I placed as my number two pick.

The two days of The Judgment of Napa were filled with beautiful moments, peppered with moving video tributes and personal memoirs. But perhaps the most exquisite wine moment was the recognition of Leeuwin Estate’s greatness.

Judging wine and blind tasting both have their flaws, but revealing intrinsic quality through comparison rather than competition is a worthy pursuit for all who care a great deal about wine and care about the future of the finest.

Judgment of Napa: the Chardonnays

WINE A

Joseph Drouhin, Clos des Mouches 1er Cru, Beaune, Burgundy, France 2018

Expert Panel ranking: 2

Event Panel ranking: 4

Clare Tooley MW ranking: 6

WINE B

Domaine Ramonet, Bâtard-Montrachet Grand Cru, Burgundy, France 2018

Expert Panel ranking: 2

Event Panel ranking: 6

Clare Tooley MW ranking: 2

WINE C

Kistler Vineyards, Vine Hill Chardonnay, Russian River Valley, California, USA 2018

Expert Panel ranking: 3

Event Panel ranking: 7

Clare Tooley MW ranking: 8

WINE D

Domaine Leflaive, Les Pucelles 1er Cru, Puligny-Montrachet, Burgundy, France 2018

Expert Panel ranking: 3

Event Panel ranking: 10

Clare Tooley MW ranking: 9

WINE E

Peter Michael, Belle Côte, Knights Valley, Sonoma County, California, USA 2018

Expert Panel ranking: 7

Event Panel ranking: 10

Clare Tooley MW ranking: 5

WINE F

Gaja, Gaia & Rey Chardonnay, Langhe, Piedmont, Italy 2018

Expert Panel ranking: 8

Event Panel ranking: 8

Clare Tooley MW ranking: 10

WINE G

Leeuwin Estate, Art Series Chardonnay, Margaret River, Western Australia 2018

Expert Panel ranking: 1

Event Panel ranking: 1

Clare Tooley MW ranking: 4

WINE H Hudson, Seashell Chardonnay, Carneros, California, USA 2018

Expert Panel ranking: 6

Event Panel ranking: 5

Clare Tooley MW ranking: 3

WINE I

Domaine des Comtes Lafon, Charmes 1er Cru, Meursault, Burgundy, France 2018

Expert Panel ranking: 9

Event Panel ranking: 9

Clare Tooley MW ranking: 7

WINE J

Aubert Wines, CIX Chardonnay, Sonoma Coast, California, USA 2018

Expert Panel ranking: 5

Event Panel ranking: 4

Clare Tooley MW ranking: 1

Judgment of Napa: the Chardonnays and Clare Tooley MW’s verdict

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