On a recent trip to France I was taken, still groggy from jet lag, to the Macon, the large sub-region in Burgundy that serves as its southern flank. The Macon is vast relative to the slender and cherished strip of geological chaos that makes up the Cote d’Or, and seemingly remote: much of it is closer to Lyon, the gateway to the Rhône, than it is to Dijon, and while it looks very similar to its neighbors to the north, especially in October when the leaves have yellowed from cool nights, it’s nowhere near as revered.
At one point I shook myself awake enough to ask where we were. Our driver Julian put his index finger to his lip thoughtfully (we quickly learned that this was a ploy of his, to look like he knew where he was, when in fact he was quite lost), located a sign, and announced, helpfully: “En Chardonnay, je croix.” That’s right, we were in the village of Chardonnay, in the heart of the Macon, surrounded by hundreds of hectares of vines that bear its name. For the Macon produces little else.
I’d like to be able to say that Chardonnay looked and felt like a destination, that it was a kind of de facto capital of the region, and that pilgrims flocked to the place as if it were a Mecca of sorts for white wine, the birthplace of the most popular and ubiquitous grape on earth. But in fact it was completely unremarkable, hardly distinguishable from all of the other tiny stone villages nearby.
Most of these contribute agreeable, relatively simple wines that are light, crisp, and refreshing, approaching Chablis’ nerve but lacking its assertive, stony minerality. For the most part they are nothing like the wines of the Cote d’Or, the great Chardonnay communes of Meursault, Puligny-Montrachet, and Chassagne-Montrachet. In part this is true because the wines of the Macon rarely use oak fermentation and aging as in these other places, and so they’re fairly dressed down, unadorned. The wines of the region amount to one of Chardonnay’s purest expressions. The question is, is that enough?
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To exemplify the other extreme we have California, whose Chardonnays bear no resemblance to those found in the Macon. With their oak-laden flavors and buxom and buttery textures, they don’t even resemble wine all that much; many of them have a flavor profile that better corresponds with a butterscotch milkshake. Lately, too, they’re being bottled with alcohol levels so extreme that one critic I know no longer calls Chardonnay wine. He refers to it as an alcohol delivery system.
While no one can question their popularity, trying to work with these wines in a restaurant can be a challenge. Most sommeliers I know find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to keep ample stocks of a class of wine that flies in the face of the very purpose of wine in a restaurant: to provide a counterpoint to the food.
Sommeliers really admire the pure expression of Chardonnay as found in Chablis and Macon. But they still run into problems with these wines. “I have a beautiful Macon-Solutré by the glass,” says Jonathan Waters of Chez Panisse. “It has all the right notes, tart green apple skin flavors, really delicious. But for many domestic drinkers that’s too far away from what they’ve learned Chardonnay is–except that they’re often responding to the attributes of manipulation, rather than the grape’s real flavors. The Macon is just not very ‘Chardonnay-ey’ to them.”
Which goes to the heart of the problem: there’s Chardonnay and there’s “Chardonnay-ey,” and they are not the same thing. Some of the blame for the confusion lies with the grape itself. Chardonnay is not an inherently expressive varietal, compared with, well, anything, from Riesling to Viognier. Fermented on its own, it’s a juice that practically begs for manipulation, which is how oak barrels and malolactic fermentation have come to be mistaken for the grape’s essential flavors, bestowing largely neutral base material with richness, heft, and complexity. All of which raises the question: does Chardonnay have natural beauty, or is its beauty attributable to a set of cosmetic acts?
Fortunately, there is a small but growing group of Chardonnay producers that has been turning away from overblown, heavily-oaked styles, producing instead a few new renditions of Chardonnay. Even in California.
Not possible? Meet Greg Brewer, the winemaker at Melville vineyard, who’s so committed to this idea that he’s making a wine he calls “Inox” (short for inoxidible, or stainless steel, in French) from some of his finest Chardonnay vineyards in California’s Santa Rita Hills. Brewer makes several Chardonnays from a variety of blocks on Melville’s estate vineyard. Inox, however, is typically what gets his heart racing. “We feel it’s the ultimate statement. It’s the most exciting section of the vineyard, it’s more than deliberate in its execution, not just some second label afterthought.”
Make no mistake, this is a California wine. It’s hefty, big-shouldered, powerful, high in alcohol, bold and direct. But it also tastes like wine, not like anything it sat in. Not only is it pure, it’s pure California, or as Brewer says himself: “It’s fatty and lovable but still with some precision.” Melville’s not the only winery experimenting with unoaked wines: others include Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Morgan, and perhaps the original, Stony Hill.
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The sea change in Chardonnay is happening in Oregon, too, but from an entirely different standpoint. Oregon gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that it sits at the same latitude as Burgundy, and for the last decade or more that claim has been a great selling point, since their Pinot Noirs are showing such exceptional quality and character.
But for all of their success with Pinot Noir, Oregon Chardonnay languished, badly. Flavors tended to be lifeless; the fruit, if it was there at all, had a mean vegetal tinge to it, and textures were completely out of whack: the wines performed the rather impressive feat of tasting flat even as they took the enamel off your teeth. To compensate, winemakers lavished the wines with oak, contributing little to the morass. Soon critics took notice of their dreadfulness. Winemakers, says David Adelsheim, “were being hammered so hard they were hunched over, thinking about how to get out of the business.”
Pioneers like Adelsheim knew there was no reason why Chardonnay shouldn’t excel in Oregon, just as it did in Burgundy. This was the early eighties, when the word “clone” still elicited glazed looks in the eyes of viticulturalists. But the French were starting seminal research on different plant material, and discovering that certain plants thrived in certain conditions, and that you could select vines, essentially, to match terroirs.
The early plantings of Chardonnay in Oregon consisted of clone #108, which was perfectly suited to the particular weather pattern of warm springs, cool summers, and golden autumns&of California. But in Oregon, 108 was an especially poor fit. The vines flowered late, developed slowly, set huge, gangly clusters, cropped at huge levels, and took so long to ripen that harvest invariably bumped into Oregon’s fall rain season. It was a rare year that the grapes were ripe enough before the rains came.
Through many years of trials, quarantines, experiments and crossed fingers, the Oregon community hit upon clones with a growing pattern that corresponded to Oregon’s summer season. Not surprisingly, these were from Burgundy, with the most successful cuttings derived from vineyards in Meursault. In the last ten years those vines are finally coming to fruition, and Oregon’s Chardonnays are showing character as they never did before.
The difference is immediately evident in the glass. The “Dijon” Chardonnay vines are now thriving in Oregon’s cool climate, producing Chardonnay that’s on a par with the region’s much heralded Pinot Noirs. Like the Pinots, Oregon Chardonnays are gently perfumed, well-structured, mineral-tinged wines with high-toned fruit and relatively low alcohols. Like Meursault, the fruit is rich without being cloying, redolent of fresh apples and pears, and bears a pleasing hint of nuttiness.
Seven wineries in Oregon–Adelsheim, Argyle, Chehalem, Domaine Drouhin Oregon, Domaine Serene, Hamacher and Ponzi–have formed an organization called ORCA, or the Oregon Chardonnay Alliance, that calls attention to the successful clonal conversion in the state (it’s difficult at this point even to find any of the old clone in the ground). If you haven’t tasted an Oregon Chardonnay–or if they’ve driven you away prior to this sea change–you owe it to yourself to take another pass.
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Meanwhile, back in the Macon, the days of simple, pleasant wines may be waning. That afternoon in the Macon, we met with Frédéric Burrier of Chateau de Beauregard in the Pouilly-Fuissé AOC, who has been isolating terroir expression from his family’s domaine with the same obsessiveness, and fastidiousness, as those who parse the Cote d’Or with fine toothed combs. Pouilly-Fuissé amounts to the tail end of Burgundy to the south, marked by two dramatic shelf-like cliffs, below which begins Beaujolais. The soils from the region are understandably complex, and Burrier makes four different iterations from his family vineyards to reflect that complexity (as well as some cepages from neighboring Saint-Veran). His finest wine, however, is a tete de cuvee called Grand Beauregard that is clearly being made to vie with the Premier Cru and Grand Cru wines of the Cote d’Or. Indeed, this is a powerful, deeply structured wine with the sort of density and length that’s usually associated with the great Chardonnays of the north.
The Macon has long been the home of diligent and exceptional winemakers like Burrier, but has rarely attracted the attention of winemakers from the north (aside from large negociants, whose interest was mostly economic). Now, however, some of the great Chardonnay producers of the Cote d’Or are making their way to the Macon and beginning projects. Recently, Anne LeFlaive of Domaine LeFlaive purchased land there, and Dominique Lafon of Comte Lafon is now making a half-dozen wines from tiny sub-appellations like Uchizy and Milly-Lamartine. Judging from the initial efforts of Dominique Lafon (tasted in his cellar this fall), we’re onto a Maconnais renaissance: these are wines of uncommon breadth for the Macon, with a concentrated, honeyed richness that is rarely found there–and yet these wines have the precise mineral structure and mouth-watering acidity found in most wines from the Macon. They are not really designed to rival his Montrachet–but they’re impressive all the same.
All of which points to a grape finding new ways to articulate itself, suggesting that Chardonnay might indeed be a destination to which we all, as pilgrims, ought to return.
Patrick Comiskey is a freelance wine writer as well as Senior Editor for Wine and Spirits. He will join Wine Review Online as a regular contributor in 2006.