How do you find a bargain in a sea of cheap wine? Well, it's not easy, but you could do worse than start with Chardonnay.
I should point out that when I refer to seas of cheap wine I am not picking on Chardonnay particularly; there is a vast ocean of nondescript dry white wine sitting on supermarket shelves around the world, from a variety of grapes, but a lot of it is Chardonnay. After all, who doesn't like Chardonnay?
It's without a doubt the world's favorite white wine. Consumers love it and – in certain circumstances (i.e. it's from the Côte d'Or) – wine writers and "educators" like it too. However, there's a massive element of snobbery around Chardonnay that can often put consumers off. All those sniffy (and slightly paradoxical) comments about Chardonnay being either too oaky or too bland have attached a certain amount of stigma to the grape.
It's understandable to a point – underpowered Chardonnay can be the very definition of bland and it's this "blank canvas" effect that makes winemakers love it, because they can do stuff with it. They can do malo and lees ageing and tons of new oak and... and that's the other end of the problem. An overdone Chardonnay can be a challenge, especially for an underprepared palate. Offer a Sauvignon Blanc drinker a belt of a buttery Sonoma Chardonnay and watch the reaction; it's priceless.
But balanced Chardonnay is a thing of beauty, ranging across the spectrum from steely, taut, green-apple flavors to rich, buttered toast and honey and beyond to flinty, struck-match, reductive notes. There's something for everyone.
Chardonnay's problem, however, is that everyone grows it. Virtually all wine-producing countries make Chardonnay and consequently, there's a lot of it out there, from the storied heights of Burgundy to the lagoons of wine pumped out annually in Southeastern Australia. So there's a lot of wine and a huge gulf in price.
Burgundy is not a place to look for value, generally. Six of the 10 most expensive white wines on earth come from there and usually any Burgundy value list is filled with Chablis. If it's ripe, rich Chardonnay you're after, there is better value beyond Burgundy, even if a fair proportion of the cheaper end consists of overripe, over-alcoholic, oak-chipped syrups, rather than balanced, refreshing wines.
So the trick is usually to head for the middle, but cast your net wide. After all, with so much Chardonnay planted worldwide, there's a good chance you'll find quality in the most unlikely locations, as our list below demonstrates.
First, as usual, the ground rules. For this series of "best value" stories, we work with a more direct point-to-dollar ratio for a simplified "bang for buck" scale than our standard algorithm for suggesting the best value wines. Simply dividing the score by the price gives a value factor and the higher the factor the better the value – a kind of points-per-dollar scale. The higher the value factor, the more points per dollar.
Usually, when we run our superlative lists, we don't take vintage into account, but since vintage variation affects the score so much, we concentrate on individual vintages of wines for our best-value lists.
Best Value Chardonnays on Wine-Searcher:That's one hell of a geographical spread. From the home of Chardonnay in Chablis to the ends of the earth – New Zealand, South Africa, Chile – via California, if you can't find something to please among that lot, then you're very hard to please indeed.
And the value is certainly there. If you take the global average price of each wine and then average it out again across the 10 wines you end up with each bottle costing an average of just $31.60, which isn't breaking anyone's bank. The average aggregated critic score works out to 92.5 for each wine, too.
Compare those numbers to last year and you can see that, if anything, Chardonnay is offering better value as time goes by – the value factors this year are all better than last year and the prices are slightly better than they were, too.
There's a big sea of Chardonnay out there and it's time to dive in.
September 15, 2020 at 07:00AM
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The World's Best Value Chardonnays | Wine-Searcher News & Features - Wine-Searcher
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