Wine Openers

Chardonnay is the world’s fifth-most planted grape but it still needs some attention. Here, winemaker Nancy Janes of Whitewater Hill Vineyards near Grand Junction, Co., checks on some new buds following a light frost.

Chardonnay has been part of American winemaking since at least 1882, when Charles Wetmore planted the vine in his vineyard in Livermore Valley east of San Francisco.

Other plantings followed and in 1912 Ernest Wente, son of C.H. Wente, founder of the winery of the same name in Livermore Valley, convinced his father to import some Chardonnay cuttings from Montpellier University in France.

Carl Wente also brought in some cuttings from the historic Gier Vineyard in Pleasanton, Cal., and gradually Wente developed his own clones.

Today, there are nearly 100,000 acres of Chardonnay planted in California and it’s estimated 80 percent of those vines are the Wente clone.

Wente also bottled the first labeled Chardonnay in 1936, and today Wente, in its fifth generation of family winemakers, bills itself as “The First Family of Chardonnay.”

In the 1970s, thanks to America’s growing interest in wine, especially a food-friendly wine that’s also a superb cocktail wine, and one whose name offered a bit of cachet to a novice wine-drinker’s vocabulary, Chardonnay rapidly became, and still is, America’s No. 1 white wine.

Popularity means more production and as production increased, overall quality suffered.

Chardonnay is a fairly neutral grape and a winemaker can affect the final result without too much effort.

‘No Oak’ Chardonnay gained popularity after a consumer backlash over winemakers using too much oak to flavor their wines.

Some winemakers, preferring to let their vineyards and the grape show themselves without added influences, use non-reactive stainless-steel tanks for fermenting and aging to get the purest expression of the grape itself (call this the French or Burgundian style).

However, like a lot of grapes, Chardonnay also reacts well to aging in oak barrels (mainly French, American or Hungarian). However, too much oak can be deleterious.

A subtle touch of oak (with hints of vanilla, spice, caramel) can highlight Chardonnay’s natural flavors. But too much oak can overwhelm and instead of Chardonnay it tastes like crème brule.

And, of course, some winemakers tried to disguise poor winemaking by adding a lot of oak, sometimes foregoing barrels in favor of oak staves or chips.

“Winemakers must have figured that if a little oak was good, a lot must be even better,” said winemaker Nancy Janes at Whitewater Hill Vineyards and Winery on Orchard Mesa in western Colorado. “Luckily, that stopped.”

Following the inevitable backlash, including a widespread consumer revolt known as ABC (Anything But Chardonnay), winemakers have come back to a more-balanced use of oak.

Today many wineries offer both oak and no-oak choices.

“I’m seeing some consumers going back to a more-oaky style,” said Janes, who was one of the first in the Grand Valley to offer a no-oak Chardonnay. “Not the level of 15 years ago but more of a light oak touch.”

She offers both a no-oak style and a lightly oaked Reserve Chardonnay, the latter rapidly becoming one of her more-popular wines.

Wente also offers a selection of oak and no-oak Chardonnays, including Eric’s Chardonnay, a special, artisan-style Small Lot offering  “preserving the delicate flavors of the fruit” and “expression of the vineyard terroir,” said fifth-generation winemaker Karl Wente.

Chardonnay vines after the 2016 harvest in Colorado wine country. Chardonnay grows well in many different regions and can be adapted to many different styles.

As the Colorado summer approaches (albeit hesitantly at times), and with it the seasonal change in our dining and drinking habits, wine drinkers find themselves lured more and more to a glass of chilled white wine.

Reds are fine for winter and for those moments when the barbecue is turning out well-charred slabs of meat, but the lighter fare of warm-weather meals calls for a well-chilled (not too chilled) white wine.

Consumers have many choices in white wine and while some varieties such as Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier will always have their time in the sun, data reveals Chardonnay remains the favorite white wine of the American wine consumer.

A recent email from New York-based Nike Communications said a 2016 survey of consumer habits revealed 42 percent of U.S. white-wine drinkers said they prefer Chardonnay.

Chardonnay sales in the U.S. in 2016 totaled almost $2 billion dollars, representing nearly 20 percent of all wine sales, amounting to more than 58 million gallons of Chardonnay, enough to fill more than 80 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Finishing the 2016 Chardonnay harvest in Colorado’s Grand Valley AVA.

So popular is Chardonnay it even has its own holiday, which you might have missed. National Chardonnay Day (May 25) may or may not entitle you to a long weekend but it certainly opens the door for a glass of wine.

Chardonnay’s popularity isn’t surprising, since Chardonnay comes in many styles, is widely available and generally affordable, and is easy to pronounce.

The latter isn’t just a punch line. Most people won’t order something you can’t pronounce, a fact noted by the late Robert Mondavi who in 1968 introduced his drier (less-sweet) version of Sauvignon Blanc by, at least in some versions of this story, changing the name to Fumé Blanc. This not only was in deference to the popular dry Loire Valley wines made from Sauvignon Blanc but also in hopes people could pronounce Fumé Blanc.

The U.S. remains a #Chardonnation, as the people at Nike Communications like to put it, and according to some Nielsen data, is America’s most-asked for wine variety, followed by Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Grigio, Merlot, and Pinot Noir.

Why? Because people like the way Chardonnay tastes.

“I love this grape, it’s such a nice food wine,” said winemaker Nancy Janes at Whitewater Hill Vineyard on Orchard Mesa. “It’s sometimes hard for me to pin down the complexity of Chardonnay but it’s so food friendly.”

Riesling may be known as the world’s most-transparent grape because it shows its place of origin so clearly, but Chardonnay may well be the most-neutral and the grape winemakers love most to work with.

It grows almost everywhere and can be adapted to nearly any style, from lean and crisp to buttery and round, heavily fermented in oak barrel or completely non-oaked in stainless steel.

Chardonnay, by its nature, benefits from the judicious use of oak but by that very mutability led to a downturn in Chardonnay’s popularity when a consumer backlash against the increasing use of oak and oak flavorings (some fad, some to cover sins in winemaking) brought on a consumer backlash in the ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) movement.

Recently, however, the general movement in winemaking is back toward using oak as a highlight, not the feature, although there still are many people who want a mouth-filling, buttery Chardonnay.

It’s been said you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince or princess, and the same might be said of Chardonnay. It takes some research (tough, but someone has to do it) to find the right Chardonnay for you, but given its abundance and popularity, the field work will be rewarding by itself.