Chardonnay is the single most popular wine in America, and ranks near the top in many other countries.

 

The word that perhaps best describes Chardonnay and explains its popularity is the word ‘rich.’ With a distinct, delicate, yet hard to characterize aroma, Chardonnay is often easier to recognize when encountered.

Chardonnay often carries aromas of apple and peach, citrus flavors of lemon, lime, orange, tangerine, and tropical fruit, especially pineapple, banana, mango, guava, kiwi, to floral flavors of acacia, hawthorn. It is so delicate, in fact, that even blending small amounts of other varieties into a Chardonnay will usually completely mask its aroma and flavor. Notes of oak are often pronounced, especially if it is fermented or aged in new barrels or too long in older, seasoned barrels.

With processing, Chardonnay generally offers bouquets and flavors of ranging from malolactic, such as butter, cream, and hazelnut; to soft oak hints of vanilla, sweet wood, and coconut; to heavier oak notes of oak, smoke, toast, lees, and yeast. Terroir qualities often include flint, mineral, and mint.

Chardonnay’s delicate nature allows it fully express the influences of both vinification technique and appellation of origin. As such, it generally offers an excellent reflection of the given terroir.

Chardonnay is the only grape permitted in the Chablis region of France, where it is known for yielding a "crisp, flinty" wine with notes of limestone. In the Meursault appellation, chardonnay takes on a lush, ripe, "fleshy", "buttery" characteristics. Chardonnay is the central varietal used in quality sparkling wines and French Champagne.

California-grown Chardonnay carries an even more effusive varietal quality. Chadonnay’s superior sugar/acid balance is one of the telltale qualities that makes Chardonnay so unmistakable in the mouth, along with its full body, and smooth drinkability.

Because vineyards in France are often planted with a commingling of chardonnay and pinot blanc vines, pinot has often been mistakenly associated with Chardonnay. In spite of its heritage and the mistaken associations between the two, Chardonnay is not considered a member of the "pinot" grape family, like pinot noir, pinot blanc, pinot gris, etc.

California has achieved real success growing Chardonnay and enhancing its popularity as wine. It has also been a successful grape in Australia, where it also is sometimes goes by the misleading name "pinot chardonnay".

Unfortunately, chardonnay vines are both low-yielding and susceptible to myriad infirmities. Chardonnay grapes are relatively small, thin-skinned, fragile, and subject to easy oxidization. These qualities make chardonnay more sensitive to winemaking techniques and more challenging to shepherd from harvest to bottling than most other grape varieties.

Chardonnay flavor profile carries on a wide-variation in accordance with whatever winemaking techniques are used to produce it.

Such techniques as barrel fermentation, proportion of new to old cooperage, lees stirring, lees aging, and partial, complete, or prevention of malolactic fermentation are the subject of some controversy and spirited discussion among winemakers.

Chardonnay's innate carte blanche quality also permits its flavors to be substantially influenced by variances in soil, climate, and vineyard techniques.

The chardonnay vine also shares a common tendency among wine grapes to mutate, and research has isolated over 400 clonal variants.

Each clone carries traits common to the chardonnay family, but each exhibits specific individual tendencies of such characteristics as length of ripening cycle, crop load, berry and cluster size, acid retention, etc., therefore producing wines with wide-ranging flavor differences.

Chadonnay’s widespread popularity sparked many new California plantings in the early 1970s.

Through the 1970s, the most commonly planted Chadonnay clones was the "Wente" clone (UCD 2A) and, later, clone 108, isolated at UC Davis from vines grown in Carneros. Due to this grape's blank slate qualities and the growing number of new vineyards sourcing mainly these two clones, regional differences in Chardonnay wines became more prominent than did variations in any other varietal wine in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In the 1990s, California vintners began to pay close attention to pairing both specific varieties and clone type to specific regional microclimates and vineyard sites. Many new vineyards and re-plantings since then, especially in cooler regions, have propogated the "Dijon" clones (particularly 75, 76, 78, 95 and 96), and the "Espiguette" clone (352), with a few locations going in for "Champagne" clones.

The Chardonnay grape has gained strong popularity in Australia and New Zealand, where the trend has moved toward crafting unblended Chardonnay wines bursting with flavors of citrus, melon and temperate fruits, both with and without the added complexities gained by oak-aging.

Recently, the Australian Chardonnays have largely moved away from the diacetyl produced by the presence of malolactic fermenting bacteria, which yields the buttery flavour common in many Chardonnay wines. Absent these properties, Chardonnay takes on a crisp, flinty, mineral-rich character.

Chardonnay will pair well with poultry dishes, pork, seafood or rich, buttery creams and sauces.