A lover of big buttery wines wrote in after seeing Chardonnay on my website to ask for recommendations for \u2018real\u2019 Chardonnays because she and her husband miss them. She\u2019s not alone.<\/p>\n
Big buttery Chardonnays are still made but they are a cult that has mostly fallen from grace, with other 1980s trends we have cast aside. Pointy shoes, shoulder pads or permed hair, anyone?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s plenty of quirky fashion around today but most winemakers have intentionally moved away from Chardonnay that tastes like it has spent a lifetime in heavily toasted oak barrels with melted butter on the side.<\/p>\n
If wine lovers could revisit buttery Chardonnays from the 1980s and 1990s, would they enjoy them? Or do our minds talk our taste buds into thinking we crave certain flavours when really we have evolved to enjoy similar but different tastes.<\/p>\n
Winemaker Tim Bourne from Escarpment Vineyard in Martinborough thinks it\u2019s the latter.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not sure people would like those buttery Chardonnays today because they were overworked wines and it\u2019s probably more of a nostalgia for a time and place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chardonnay is often referred to as \u2018the winemaker\u2019s grape\u2019 because its lack of strong aromatic scent makes it malleable and a bit of a blank slate on which to express flavours of malolactic fermentation (the conversion of malic acid in grapes to lactic acid, hence the creaminess) or oak or to allow it to faithfully express its origins in the glass by pulling back from all those bells and whistles.<\/p>\n
Winemaker Helen Masters from Ata Rangi says she leapfrogged the buttery Chardonnay era and sees the flavour as a distraction from great Chardonnay.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never like bigness in Chardonnay and wanted to slim it down when I started making wine. We have grapes with inherent richness and weight. I don\u2019t think we need to build more.\u201d<\/p>\n
To achieve a slimmer style of Chardonnay which still has flesh and weight, she avoids battonage (a French winemaking technique to encourage creamy flavour development). She also uses 300-litre French oak puncheons. They are larger than 228-litre Burgundy barrels or 225-litre Bordeaux barriques, which were used more in the past, with oak staves and oak chips for lower-priced wines. Larger barrels mean less surface area to wines aged in them, which brings less overt oak influence.<\/p>\n
Masters and Bourne aim to highlight the place their wines come from, bringing freshness from a cool climate.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a philosophy echoed throughout New Zealand\u2019s cool climate wine regions today, which differs dramatically from the concept of \u2018making Chardonnay\u2019 to a formulaic recipe. Hawke\u2019s Bay winemaker Tony Bish is such a devotee of Chardonnay that it\u2019s all he makes at the Urban Winery in Napier. He and his son, Oscar, produce an extraordinary range of wines, as do the Brajkovich family at Kumeu River in West Auckland and the winemakers at Greystone and Pegasus Bay in North Canterbury. Not to mention the father-son winemaking team of Brian and Max Bicknell at Mahi in Marlborough or the Soho winemaking team, who produce both Waiheke Island Chardonnay (bolder and creamier) and one from Marlborough (crisper and leaner).<\/p>\n
Does a slight decline in Chardonnay over the past decade impact on the industry\u2019s future with this great white? Bish and Bicknell think not. That decline is from 3116ha of Chardonnay nationwide in 2016 to 2932ha today.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not significant in the big picture, especially as some of it represents replanting old vines. The best New Zealand Chardonnays today speak volumes and if it\u2019s time to update your taste buds with a modern take on the creamy theme, here are two great examples.<\/p>\n
Creamy and crisp Chardonnays with the X factor<\/p>\n
2024 Ata Rangi Masters Martinborough Chardonnay RRP $80 New release Chardonnay from a vineyard south of Martinborough village, this wine has aromas of citrus, nutty nuances and nicely integrated oak (30% new, all 300 litre puncheons). Bold and smooth, it drinks superbly now, in a proper glass, please. <\/p>\n
2025 Soho Carter Vineyard Waiheke Island Chardonnay RRP $60 Here\u2019s a Chardonnay that shows Waiheke\u2019s capacity for powerful, polished Chardonnay with creaminess and breadth. <\/p>\n
Ten top drops | Chardonnays <\/p>\n
2024 Main Divide Chardonnay RRP $21.99 \u2013 exceptional value. <\/p>\n
2024 Nga Waka Home Block Chardonnay RRP $42 \u2013 big and smooth. <\/p>\n
2023 Greywacke Chardonnay RRP $44 \u2013 dry, complex, full-bodied. <\/p>\n
2024 Mahi The Wrekin Chardonnay RRP $45 – creamy complexity. <\/p>\n
2024 Novum Riverbrook Vineyard Chardonnay RRP $50 \u2013 smooth and complex. <\/p>\n
2024 Villa Maria Taylors Pass Chardonnay \u2013 purity and freshness. <\/p>\n
2022 Black Stallion Los Carneros Chardonnay RRP $69.99 \u2013 creamy Californian. <\/p>\n
2021 Pegasus Bay Virtuoso Chardonnay RRP $67 \u2013 power with elegance. <\/p>\n
2021 Astrolabe The Farm Chardonnay RRP $100 \u2013 full-bodied, creamy, flavoursome. <\/p>\n
2024 Tony Bish Zen RRP $140 \u2013 full-bodied with creamy nuances. <\/p>\n
Meet the columnist<\/p>\n
Joelle Thomson is a journalist, columnist and author who fell for wine after drinking a big buttery Australian Chardonnay in Wellington in the late 1980s. She later moved to the UK, and cemented her passion for wine, writing her first column when she returned to Aotearoa in the mid-1990s. She has since published 16 wine books, taught British (WSET) and NZQA wine qualifications, judged at wine shows and obtained the WSET Level 4 Diploma. She writes full\u2011time, loves the world of wine and is particularly partial to Pinot Noir, Chianti Classico and Barolo, among others. joellethomson.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A lover of big buttery wines wrote in after seeing Chardonnay on my website to ask for recommendations…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":523154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[95,192,31036,1396,86414,259078,9853,8608,158169,78,244194,5511,6805,3234,111,43,139,69,3111,19055,59744,18923,48499,1961,64872,1316,4276,1754,29157],"class_list":["post-523153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-and","tag-are","tag-asks","tag-banks","tag-buttery","tag-chardonnay","tag-column","tag-comes","tag-crisp","tag-in","tag-joelle","tag-just","tag-memory","tag-months","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-out","tag-reliable","tag-revival","tag-styles","tag-taste","tag-this","tag-thomson","tag-when","tag-why","tag-wine","tag-wines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}