Articles / NewsChardonay
James Halliday, April 5, 2008Whichever way you look a the ABC Club, it is alive and well, There are those who loudly proclaim Anything But Chardonnay (and forage in the dreary wastelands of sauvignon blanc and even drearier pinot gris), and on the other hand the winemakers and retailers who know full well chardonnay Always Brings Cash.
AC Nielsen data, cited in the January/February 2008 Liquor Watch, shows that chardonnay created $320 million in annual sales (to October 2007), close to one-third of the value of the total bottled wine market. It also accounts for one in three bottles of every white wine sold. Given that it accounts for just under 50 per cent of the white grape crush, these figures make sense.
With a dose of poetic licence, it is possible to describe chardonnay as schizophrenic. On the one hand, there is the soft, buttery, peachy, oaky and slightly sweet wine which used to be described as sunshine in a bottle, winning the hearts and wallets of customers in the UK, the US and everywhere Australian wine was sold.
It is de rigueur for wine writers and wine nerds (buffs, if you prefer) to decry this type of chardonnay, but the fact remains that it is exactly what the larger market wants. Few would-be customers read critical reviews of soap powders, breakfast cereals, and supermarket wine shoppers and drinkers simply don't read wine articles. Decisions to buy fast moving consumer goods are based on store position and discount headlines.
But wine buyers also listen to the Jones's, and like an airborne plague, they became infected with the idea that there is something wrong with chardonnay, so they furtively buy it in brown paper bags and consume it at home when the Jones's aren't looking.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are profound changes in the winemaking approaches of the best producers of top end chardonnay in Australia. These came under the microscope at the rejuvenated wine masterclasses held as part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in March, organised by the Sommeliers Australia, and its energetic co-president, Ben Edwards.
He assembled 18 chardonnays from France, Australia, California, Italy and New Zealand, the lions share to Australia and France. The panel of Oakridge winemaker David Bicknell, sommelier Chris Crawford, wine writer and wine consultant Nick Stock and myself was asked to talk generally about chardonnay style trends in a global context, and (with reluctance) to talk about each wine in a semi-blind tasting format.
Semi, because we and the audience knew the identity of each set of six wines (presented over an hour) but not the order in which they had been poured, putting us in the same position as the audience. But even before discussion, those in the audience where asked to nominate their preferred wine.
On the first day the wines were served too cold (a lethal beer fridge the culprit), but warmer on the second day. Remarkably, the same three wines were picked from each of the three flights on each day, although the other five wines in each bracket all found some measure of support.
The common feature of the top wines was the balance struck between fruit and oak, fruit the driving force in wines which managed to combine complexity, harmony and intensity. As I have previously written, there are three quite different manifestations of top chardonnay in Australia. At one extreme, the (French) Chablis model, with the focus on minerally fruit and texture, oak largely unseen. At the other extreme is the White Burgundy model, with richness, depth and slightly feral complexity justified by the power of the fruit.
The third is in the middle, and is what I loosely call modern Australian style, taking the best bits from the other models, in much the same way as modern Australian cuisine gains inspiration from many parts of the world. The three preferred wines were in the middle style, two from Margaret River (2005 Voyager Estate and 2005 Leeuwin Estate Art Series) and one from the Yarra Valley (2006 Coldstream Hills Reserve).
While I preferred the Leeuwin Estate on each day in its group (the most highly credentialled and expensive) I preferred the 2006 Freycinet in its group (which included Voyager), and the Oakridge 864 (which was in the top group) and is this week's From the Region.
AC Nielsen data, cited in the January/February 2008 Liquor Watch, shows that chardonnay created $320 million in annual sales (to October 2007), close to one-third of the value of the total bottled wine market. It also accounts for one in three bottles of every white wine sold. Given that it accounts for just under 50 per cent of the white grape crush, these figures make sense.
With a dose of poetic licence, it is possible to describe chardonnay as schizophrenic. On the one hand, there is the soft, buttery, peachy, oaky and slightly sweet wine which used to be described as sunshine in a bottle, winning the hearts and wallets of customers in the UK, the US and everywhere Australian wine was sold.
It is de rigueur for wine writers and wine nerds (buffs, if you prefer) to decry this type of chardonnay, but the fact remains that it is exactly what the larger market wants. Few would-be customers read critical reviews of soap powders, breakfast cereals, and supermarket wine shoppers and drinkers simply don't read wine articles. Decisions to buy fast moving consumer goods are based on store position and discount headlines.
But wine buyers also listen to the Jones's, and like an airborne plague, they became infected with the idea that there is something wrong with chardonnay, so they furtively buy it in brown paper bags and consume it at home when the Jones's aren't looking.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are profound changes in the winemaking approaches of the best producers of top end chardonnay in Australia. These came under the microscope at the rejuvenated wine masterclasses held as part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in March, organised by the Sommeliers Australia, and its energetic co-president, Ben Edwards.
He assembled 18 chardonnays from France, Australia, California, Italy and New Zealand, the lions share to Australia and France. The panel of Oakridge winemaker David Bicknell, sommelier Chris Crawford, wine writer and wine consultant Nick Stock and myself was asked to talk generally about chardonnay style trends in a global context, and (with reluctance) to talk about each wine in a semi-blind tasting format.
Semi, because we and the audience knew the identity of each set of six wines (presented over an hour) but not the order in which they had been poured, putting us in the same position as the audience. But even before discussion, those in the audience where asked to nominate their preferred wine.
On the first day the wines were served too cold (a lethal beer fridge the culprit), but warmer on the second day. Remarkably, the same three wines were picked from each of the three flights on each day, although the other five wines in each bracket all found some measure of support.
The common feature of the top wines was the balance struck between fruit and oak, fruit the driving force in wines which managed to combine complexity, harmony and intensity. As I have previously written, there are three quite different manifestations of top chardonnay in Australia. At one extreme, the (French) Chablis model, with the focus on minerally fruit and texture, oak largely unseen. At the other extreme is the White Burgundy model, with richness, depth and slightly feral complexity justified by the power of the fruit.
The third is in the middle, and is what I loosely call modern Australian style, taking the best bits from the other models, in much the same way as modern Australian cuisine gains inspiration from many parts of the world. The three preferred wines were in the middle style, two from Margaret River (2005 Voyager Estate and 2005 Leeuwin Estate Art Series) and one from the Yarra Valley (2006 Coldstream Hills Reserve).
While I preferred the Leeuwin Estate on each day in its group (the most highly credentialled and expensive) I preferred the 2006 Freycinet in its group (which included Voyager), and the Oakridge 864 (which was in the top group) and is this week's From the Region.
From the Region
2006 Oakridge 864 Chardonnay
Oakridge 864 Chardonnay is the chardonnay most winemakers want to drink. It first came into the limelight with the 2004 vintage, and simply built on its reputation in 2005, and now the 2006 ($60, 96 points). The 864 series is a group of limited production, super-quality wines which are largely sold through the cellar door at 864 Maroondah Highway, Coldstream - hence the name. It has been sourced from a patch within a single Upper Yarra vineyard which winemaker David Bicknell identified as having special qualities, and then sought to do everything to allow the quality and personality of the grapes to shine through in the finished wine. Thus it is fermented in 500 litre French puncheons (twice the size of the normal barriques) with no emphasis on new oak (using wild and inoculated yeasts), and thereafter largely left to its own devices, with as little handling as possible (an approach I unkindly referred to as benign neglect). Tragically, Oakridge lost the contract for the grapes while it disentangled itself from the Evans & Tate restructuring, so this particular 864 has no immediate successor. www.oakridgeestate.com.au
James's articles appear every week in The Australian
2006 Oakridge 864 Chardonnay
Oakridge 864 Chardonnay is the chardonnay most winemakers want to drink. It first came into the limelight with the 2004 vintage, and simply built on its reputation in 2005, and now the 2006 ($60, 96 points). The 864 series is a group of limited production, super-quality wines which are largely sold through the cellar door at 864 Maroondah Highway, Coldstream - hence the name. It has been sourced from a patch within a single Upper Yarra vineyard which winemaker David Bicknell identified as having special qualities, and then sought to do everything to allow the quality and personality of the grapes to shine through in the finished wine. Thus it is fermented in 500 litre French puncheons (twice the size of the normal barriques) with no emphasis on new oak (using wild and inoculated yeasts), and thereafter largely left to its own devices, with as little handling as possible (an approach I unkindly referred to as benign neglect). Tragically, Oakridge lost the contract for the grapes while it disentangled itself from the Evans & Tate restructuring, so this particular 864 has no immediate successor. www.oakridgeestate.com.au
James's articles appear every week in The Australian
