The brighter side of US Chardonnay plus 10 brilliant wines

American Chardonnay is doing just fine. In spite of challenges, generalisations and dismissal, the grape that put modern American wine on the map is still producing some of the country’s best wines, from California to the Jersey shore.

American wine began to rise to prominence in the 1800s in Napa and the San Pablo and San Francisco Bay areas, closer to the booming city of San Francisco. A region that remains the epicentre of the country’s wine culture today.

The 18th Amendment, otherwise known as the Volstead Act or Prohibition, came along and shut the whole thing down. For thirteen years, from 1920 to 1933, America’s nascent wine culture sat in slumber, wineries shuttered and vineyards were ripped out.

When it all ended, it would take approximately 43 years for American wine to get noticed again. This time, it would be a Chardonnay that helped put America back on the map. The 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay would stand head and shoulders above a selection of white Burgundies at the 1976 Judgement of Paris.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Styles and stereotypes

For a few decades, beginning in the early 1980s, while it wasn’t universal, there was a ubiquity of ripe, full-bodied Chardonnay, with plenty of fruit, a little sweetness, and very little acidity. This style started in California but could be found in warmer growing regions as well. It was popular with many consumers, with a few examples scoring highly in some of the major American wine publications.

This dominant style of Chardonnay was not exclusively about oak. Visit any cave in Meursault, and you will see how historically important the marriage of Chardonnay and oak barrels is in the world’s most exquisite white Burgundies.

This style was more about the combination of factors:

• Ripe fruit: Chardonnay was planted in warmer sites and harvested at higher brix. Picking Chardonnay at higher sugar levels resulted in wines with more ripe fruit, less acidity and higher alcohol levels. Alcohol can contribute to a wine’s mouthfeel or viscosity.
• Full malolactic fermentation married to new heavily toasted oak barrels at warmer temperatures minimises acidity and maximises fruit flavours and oak influence. Diacetyl is a by-product of the malolactic process and is identified by winemakers as the driver of the buttery aromatics in Chardonnays that have undergone malolactic fermentation.
• The use of oak barrels can allow the wine to evolve through slow respiration and oxygen exposure through the wood’s pores. It can also impart flavours and aromas fundamental to the ‘buttery’ style that became popular. The presence of wood lipid lactones and vanillin, a volatile phenol that unsurprisingly imparts vanilla aromas and flavours in wine.

‘Confidence is the best accessory’

‘Chardonnay isn’t a wine-making technique. It’s a grape,’ Willamette Valley pioneer David Adelsheim points out.

Adelsheim was at the forefront of the adaptation of Dijon Chardonnay clones in the cooler climate of Oregon. ‘In order to make Chardonnay well, you need winemaking that actually respects the identity of the grape and the variety that you can achieve with Chardonnay, vintage to vintage.’

Styles come and go, but Chardonnay remains an American wine stalwart. From Michigan to Oregon, to the Napa Valley, Chardonnay is the queen of white wine grapes in America. The pursuit of balance and terroir has taken centre stage for fine wine producers. Notions of butter remain, with grocery store wine brands with the word butter in the brand name remaining popular with certain sectors of wine consumers.

Chardonnay, though, has a bright present and future in America. In places like the Sonoma Coast, Santa Barbara and Oregon’s Willamette Valley, it is every bit as good if not better than the region’s famed Pinot Noirs. While Napa is Cabernet country, the historic Chardonnays of Stony Hill, Kongsgaard, Smith-Madrone and a few others are undeniably some of the valley’s top wines.

Winemakers from either coast and in between are pursuing wines that, in the words of David Adelsheim, ‘respect the identity of the grape and the variety that you can achieve vintage to vintage’.

An array of US Chardonnay

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• Best Chardonnays outside Burgundy
• Elaine Chukan Brown: ‘For an emerging region, success with a grape like Chardonnay proves tricky’