AUSSIE CHARDONNAY: 20 WINES TO SNAP UP
There’s a reason Chardonnay has endured (despite the Anything But Chardonnay blip) as wine lovers’ favourite white. It’s all things to all people: available in 99% of retailers and restaurants, at pocket-friendly to suitably show-off prices, with examples from almost every wine-producing country.
Arguably its most valuable quality, however, is flexibility of style. Whether you like a richly oaked, opulently tropical, buttery wine, or a more lean, citrus-driven, minerally one, there’s a Chardonnay for you. And nowhere, outside its heartland of Burgundy, crafts these two contrasting Chardonnay styles to such an equally high standard as does Australia.
This is in part due to the sheer scale of the country, and therefore the myriad climates, elevations, terroirs and vintage differences that make each Chardonnay-producing region like a different European nation. From the Tamar Valley in Tasmania to Hunter Valley in New South Wales is the same distance as from London to Naples in Italy – 1,600km. And the 3,500km from Margaret River in Western Australia to Beechworth in eastern Victoria is like driving from London to Tbilisi in Georgia.
Chardonnay’s style-for-all malleability is also thanks to the ease with which its taste can be manipulated. Picking dates and fruit ripeness, wild yeasts, malolactic fermentation and lees stirring, not to mention the use of oak: all of these have an impact on body, structure, texture, aroma and flavour.
Ripe, oaky, creamy, high-octane Chardonnay is what made Australia’s name in the 1980s and
