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Best California Chardonnay Wine
There are literally hundreds of Chardonnays to come out of California. The best way of discovering which kind you like is to taste as many as possible and maybe do a wine tour too. One of the most popular ones is 2006 Chardonnay Sonoma County, priced at $14.
This is slightly creamy but still clean tasting with hints of peach, pear, buttered popcorn, and oak. If you like Chardonnay but are not so keen on a heavy oak taste, you might like 2006 Chardonnay Napa Valley Oak Free, which is $22 a bottle. This wine has notes of lime zest, pear, chive, and nectarine. It is crisp, clean, and great with spring or summer foods.
2003 Chardonnay Central Coast is only $10 and it offers creamy fig and pear flavors, zesty lemon and the buttery oak on the finish. Most Chardonnays keep for up to 3 or 4 years if stored properly, but check at the time of buying if you don't plan to drink it right away how to store it and how long for. 2004 Mosaic Chardonnay from Sonoma County is made from a blend of Chardonnay grapes from various vineyards.
Some grapes are more aromatic, some are crisper, and some are sweeter. The Mosaic Chardonnay has peach, fig and melon aromas and a toasty, vanilla, and butterscotch flavor. It is medium-bodied and delicious.
More About Chardonnay
This delicious wine appeals to so many people and whether you prefer a 2004 Mosaic Chardonnay, a 2003 Chardonnay Central Coast variety or another of California's best wines, Chardonnay is well reputed as being easy to drink. Chardonnay grapes are green-skinned and they are believed to have originated in Burgundy, France, an area, which is renowned for great wine. They are now grown all over the wine-producing world, from New Zealand to the UK. Growing chardonnay grapes is something that new wine-producing regions tend to do first, to prove themselves.
The grape has quite a neutral taste but the resulting wine can be buttery, oaked, fruity, tropical tasting or dry. Champagne is a wine, which is made with Chardonnay grapes. This wine peaked in the late 1980s but it is still one of the most widely planted varieties of grapes planted today. The most common grape in the world is Airen but Chardonnay is the second. Chardonnay is one of the main grapes grown in the Champagne region of France. It does well on the chalky soil in the Marne area.
Chardonnay in California
Californian Chardonnay is one of the most famous wines in the world and all this began in 1976 when a Californian Chardonnay won an award at a French blind tasting event. There were more vines planted in California than in France in 1988 because of the huge demand for Chardonnay. There were almost a hundred thousand acres by 2005 in California, which accounted for nearly a quarter of the Chardonnay plantings in the world. Early Chardonnays imitated Burgundy wines but later ones became more oaked and buttery so the wine developed a flavor of its own. The grapes were harvested when they were very ripe in the late 1970s and new oak barrels were used to age them, to ensure a prominent oaked flavor.
Although the wine was really popular at the time, it also received criticism. Some people claimed that because the wine was so big and bold it was difficult to pair with food. Also, the percentage of alcohol in Californian Chardonnays tends to be on the high side. In recent years though, winemakers have used spinning cones, reverse osmosis and other methods to make sure the alcohol content stay within reasonable levels. The areas in California where premium quality Chardonnay is made are those where the coastal fogs slow down grape ripening. This gives the grape more time to let its flavors develop. Today Chardonnay remains one of the best-selling wines in the world.
