My Guilty Pleasure
The Golden choice in wine.
By Melinda Ledden Sidak
NRO
I have a confession to make. It’s about an embarrassing habit that has earned me the sneers and pitying glances of sommeliers and right-thinking people from Europe to the Caribbean. You see, I love to drink Big California chardonnays. Big, fruity, buttery, oaky, in-your-face, so-over, 90s-style chardonnay.
And I refuse to apologize for it.
Chardonnay always has seemed to be a very loaded sort of wine compared with other varieties. People think they know something about you the instant they hear you order. The central stigma in the U.S. is its alleged association with affluent political liberals. The term “chardonnay-sipping,” usually is paired with other derogatory compound phrases such as “Volvo-driving,” “brie (or sushi)-eating” “running shoe wearing” and less colorful epithets like “snob” and “sissy.” In this formulation, by the way, chardonnay sippers always live in “leafy” neighborhoods.
In the U.K., by contrast, chardonnay has acquired a decidedly down-market connotation, as “the choice of footballer’s wives, more chavvie than classy,” according to one wine newsletter. “Chavvie” evidently is an offensive slang term for a tramp or gypsy. Either way, it’s nothing to be proud of. Chardonnay is not as unfashionable as merlot has been since the movie Sideways came out, but runs a close second.
Among the wine cognoscenti, the big California chardonnay is an object of open condescension and, in many cases, outright rage and condemnation. For purists, the heavy oaking and double fermentation process known as malolactic is regarded as shoddy at best, sacrilegious at worse. Malolactic fermentation uses bacteria rather than yeast and does not commence until the primary fermentation is complete. Its purpose is to reduce acidity and enhance flavor. The influential wine critic Robert Parker is regularly pilloried—in a manner reminiscent of the similar fervent resentment directed against Bill Gates and Microsoft, —for promoting an “opulent” “globalized” style of chardonnay as well as other varietals. In response, many winemakers and wine retailers are shifting to chardonnays that use grapes picked earlier, undergo only partial malolactic fermentation, and use less oak. This, it is said, preserves the delicate and pristine flavor of the grape instead of overpowering it with oak and adulterating it through human manipulation to appeal to crude, unrefined palates such as mine and the footballers’ wives.
The only problem is that it doesn’t really taste as good.
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I just wanted to check.
