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Oaky Chardonnay’s Rocky Past
Originally published in the California issue of Wine52’s magazine Glug, Spring 2025
Wonderful handmade butter dish by the Itty Bitty Tiddy Company
It’s easy to hate on Chardonnay. Everyone does it. But winemakers never agreed with us. They love Chardonnay. She’s easy to deal with, she gets on with everyone, she’s adaptable. A chameleon, she’s just as happy in California as she is in Hungary, as decent in table wines as she is in Blanc-de-Blanc Champagne. Some might say she’s duplicitous, a bit of an opportunist, but that’s how you get ahead. It’s how one grape rose to the top of the food chain in 1970s and 80s America, and created a boom in the 90s that makes the Prosecco bubble seem like a load of froth.
If you weren’t around during the time of Big Chard, you won’t comprehend the true popularity it experienced during this time without a bit of background character development. New World Chardonnay went from blandly present on wine lists to becoming the dining room’s greatest star, and like many rags-to-riches stories, it started with a makeover. After 50 years of growing grapes during the Gold Rush, throughout the Prohibition and during WWII, the post-war period in the US saw winemakers in California starting to make wine for a society that had started to hanker after a little sophistication. Dry white wines became more popular in 1950s households towards the end of the decade, and by the 1960s, American winemakers had space to stretch their creative muscles. Drinkers were more open to trying wine styles other than sweet dessert wines or vermouth for their martinis, and iconic Hollywood films set in the glamorous French Riviera helped to bring bottles of wine to the dinner table among suburban, upwardly-mobile American families. How very European. How very chic. The American palate originally opted for dry whites over sweet, but bigger has always been better Stateside, and when winemakers in Napa started using American oak — normally reserved for Bourbon, Rye, and red wines — for their beautifully-ripened Chardonnay harvests to make bolder wines, the people were ready.
Creating a Butter Bomb
When oak, particularly new, fragrant oak is used to age white wine, the aromatics from the wood become part of the final experience. As well as using oak barrels to age what was primarily a balanced dry white with pronounced citrus flavours — tropical and stone fruits if left to ripen further in the Cali sun — malolactic fermentation was allowed to happen. This process is what occurs when malic acid, found naturally in pressed grape juice, converts after fermentation into lactic acid thanks to the presence of lactic acid bacteria. Malic acid is most commonly seen in apples, and has a distinctive green apple acidity flavour. Lactic acid is mostly found in milk and dairy products, and has a creamy or yoghurt-like flavour. Winemakers can choose to allow malolactic fermentation to occur to create a different character in their wine, and this is what they did, creating a new frontier of Chardonnay that was at once creamy, opulent and buttery. Add to this the aromatics from the oak producing vanilla and butterscotch like good old fashioned American movie theatre popcorn you could daintily snack on while watching influentially beautiful films starring Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren, and a new American superstar was born.
This love affair with “butter bomb” Chardonnay turned it into a status symbol by the 1980s. During a decade of the rich getting richer, it follows that Chardonnays got bigger, richer, and more expensive. Everyday people might not have been making millions on the stock market or cashing in on lucrative business deals, but many middle-class Americans were doing okay. They couldn’t afford whisky and cigars at lunch nor Bollinger with every meal, but they could have a taste of that wealth in their refrigerator at home. That aspirational bottle was, and remained so throughout the excess of the 90s, the buttery Chardonnay OG, Rombauer. That white label with its gold crest and yellow lozenge-shaped logo of Rombauer Carneros was, for almost 20 years, the brand to be seen with at the country club. Of course, aspiration inspires, and soon people wanted a little of that life, even if they had never played tennis doubles in their mother’s pearls before. Winemakers from across the world saw this, and began making their own takes on the butter bomb. Australia was especially successful at getting the recipe right, and soon even your average Joesephines could grab a bottle of success at the local corner shop. Oaky Chardonnay had been experiencing a wave of popularity, but this trend grew the style to new heights. It became the standard house white, it became everyone’s favourite — even if they didn’t like it. Many people who tried wine for the first time in the 90s are still convinced they hate white wine because what they had was so intense and overblown. Enter the Anything But Chardonnay crowd.
Anything But Chardonnay
Towards the turn of the Millennium, fashion stopped being about power and gravitas, and status began to show in monochrome and minimalism. Butter bombs just didn’t pair with Calvin Klein. Wine drinkers turned to lighter, less bolshy wines that suited their newfound love for laughing with salads. In 1999, long lunches were out, and drinkers wanted something that reflected their newfound ideals of clean, minimal luxury. “ABC” — Anything But Chardonnay — became the rallying cry of diners across America, who desired acidity, minerality, and ideally, something European to prove their jet setting credentials. Sancerre became an overnight favourite, pairing beautifully with low cal sushi and shrimp salads. But now, we’ve moved on again. It’s 27 years since the ABC movement began. Some wine lovers have lived their entire lives never knowing the smothering embrace of a butterscotch Chardonnay. They’re hard to find on UK shelves — so unpopular now that you may have to visit a specialist to get your hands on one. But do. Wine trends change with fashion and politics, and as we live through an unsettled, chaotic time of constant change and fear, the trend for austere-luxe has to end sometime. During the recession in the mid 2000s, neon accessories and backcombed hair briefly made a comeback, and with it came bold, tropical Sauvignon Blanc. The Beige cashmere and ecru silk of 2025 will give way to shoulderpads and lamé, you mark my words. And when it does, Californian Chardonnay will be there, done up for a night out, offering you a Silk Cut.
