The Chardonnay Blind Mock Mini Exam

 

One of the classic questions on the MW tasting exam focuses on identifying chardonnay from numerous regions.  As chardonnay is a grape which lends itself to manipulation (or "flexibility to technique" if the word "manipulation" makes you uneasy), this provides a particular challenge as you need to quickly weed out if the character you are tasting comes from what the winemaker did to it as opposed to where it came from.  Is that little bitter note on the finish lack of ripeness, oak, or maybe lees?  This is hard enough if you have some time to spend on each wine, but under the shadow of a ticking clock it gets even more difficult.  I can't tell you how many times I have been in mocks where I am thinking to myself "God damn is this chardonnay expressive and tasty!  This must be a super premium $100 bottle from Australia.  Wait... It sort of tastes like butterscotch and candy... This might be fucking Yellow Tail..."  Next thing you know you are panicking because the 100 words you just wrote about how amazing this wine is and how it sells for $100 in fancy restaurants was about a $9 bottle of Yellow Tail that is sitting on the bottom shelf of a Walgreens just waiting for some Mom to come along and toss it in her basket.  Seriously.  It happens all the time in those mock exams.  Me being a Budget Wine Guy in the 1990s, I know my Yellow Tail and Barefoot.  Don't fuck with me in that world.  I can ID that shit in a styrofoam cup if I have to...  

The classic set of wines is usually something like a premier cru Chablis, a New World premium example from Marlborough/Australia/Russian River, a Macon Village level wine, and then a cheap ass Yellow Tail or California Central Coast wine.  It's nice when you get the "Four wines/two countries" version of that question as at least you can focus on what is from France and what is from California/Australia.  In that version, the Russian River wine usually pops out because it is rich and lavishly oaked, then you have to make the decisions on the other three.  My challenge is that I can't reliably identify Chablis, especially if the Macon is made in a similar way (unoaked/steel tank) and the vintage was warm in Chablis.  Is that bitterness at the finish "flint" or is that "just sort of crappy wine"?  It's a razor's edge between charging $75 and $15, mostly due to your French postal code.  

I set up a group of four wines for myself where I tried to have them taste as close to each other as I could to make it challenging.  I was sort of a slave as to what the high end grocery store had in stock for the Cali wine.  I know what the wines are in this exam, I just need to figure out which is which when I walk out of the room and they get coravined into their glasses.  Based on that scenario, I am looking for a 100% score.  Anything less is failure.  It's a tricky group.  I did a 2023 Patrick Piuze Chablis "Terroir Decouverte", 2024 Yellow Tail chardonnay, 2024 Albert Bichot Macon-Villages, and a 2023 "The Hilt" Sta Rita Hills chardonnay.  In theory I should be able to identify the Chablis and The Hilt as $50+ high quality wines, pick out the warm climate candied Yellow Tail and then put what should be a neutral "OK" chardonnay into the Macon box.  It should be easy...  I set my timer and I'm off.

I nose the wines and already I have a problem.  As I have noted previously, my nose doesn't work so well.  So when I get non-aromatic wines like this my notes when compared to other MW candidates are a fucking joke.  At seminar there was this nice woman from Taiwan that read her answer out loud on a wine, and it was like "Fuji apple, creek stones, fresh sliced ginger, a wisp of cinnamon, and pollen from honeysuckle.  The bees wings have introduced a slight saltiness from his sweat while gathering the pollen.".  Mine said "apple".  I am all about structure.  It's all I've got.  The wines are cold, too cold, and they aren't giving me much.  This is also fairly common in these exams.  In the start of the white wine exam, my first 15 minutes are spent hoping I can smell a riesling or Marlborough SB leap out of the glass so I can confidently dive into writing something.  These wines?  The only thing I know for sure is wine 4 has a lot of oak.  In my head I am already thinking "that must be The Hilt".  

I start tasting the wines.  Wine 1 seems fairly rich.  I am getting baked apple/butterscotch here.  There is malo for sure in that midpalate as it's smushy.  I dunno.  It's simple.  Is this the Yellow Tail?  It seems warm climate.  This can't be the Cali coastal wine, can it?  Fuck.  I'm not sure.  OK, I'll move on.  This wine is apple/apple rind/pie crust.  It's sort of squishy too.  Is that a little oak?  It's kind of simple.  Is this the Macon?  That finish... is it savory or sweet?  Shit.  I'm not sure.  I think the first wine is carrying over in the palate.  I do this all the time.  I am moving so fast that the previous wine is sort of lingering on my taste buds and then I sip the next one which essentially creates a blend of the previous wine and whatever the current one is.  I move on to wine 3 looking for one of them to announce their identity to me.  OK, wine 3 has the lowest alcohol.  There isn't any new oak here.  Is that minerality on the finish?  The wine body is thin compared to the last one.  This is probably the Chablis.  The fruit is leaning green apple.  Mentally, I am placing this in the Chablis box.  I taste the last one, and it's apple/cinnamon/oak with ripe but lifted primary fruit.  This is the Cali wine.  I'm positive.  Very high quality, primary fruit focused, coastal influence.  I have one "banker" here.  Time to go back...

The way I should be able to tell these apart is from acid structure.  From highest acidity to lowest acid it should go Chablis/Macon/Cali/Yellow Tail.  From my notes that means it's wine 3/1/4/2.  One of the things I should have done prior to setting this up was looking at the tech sheets to know for sure how they were made.  As an aside, one of my favorite things about tech sheets and the program is whenever the tech sheet tells you what the alcohol level is, the first thing everyone does it wave that away as bullshit.  "I had the alcohol at 13.5%.  What does the sheet say?  12%.  Yeah, right!  That's bullshit!".   I have never met anyone that blind tastes that believes a tech sheet over their instantaneous educated guess during a tasting.  I include myself in that group by the way...

Looking at the tech sheets afterwards, the Chablis is hand harvest, vertical press, spontaneous ferment, steel tank 100%, cool site, last to be harvested, 12% ABV.  That should be a taut linear style wine with elevated acid and plenty of minerality.  Yellow Tail?  It allegedly has 7 g/L of residual sugar and may or may not have "some contact with oak" which probably means some lots have oak chips and are used as blending agents.  13% ABV.  That's all I know for sure.  In the past, it has always tasted like candy to me.  The Macon is 12.5% ABV, steel tank ferment with 80% aged on fine lees in steel/ 20% in used oak barrels for 8 months.  The fruit is coming from the villages around Vire Clesse.  It should taste like "chardonnay" and be unmemorable.  The Hilt is 13% ABV.  No info on fermentation vessel(s) but it's aged 35% new French oak, 60% neutral French oak, and 5% steel for 11 months.  So what does this mean?  Based on this, because of the oakiness on wine 4, that HAS to be The Hilt from California.  This is the wine which combines ripe fruit and lavish oak.  I am confident that I have this correct and write my notes for origin, market position and quality.  Now the other three are tricky.   

I tasted these too quickly, so now I don't necessarily believe my notes.  A little bit of time has passed and the increase in temperature and the oxygen hitting them has opened them up a bit.  Wine two smells like candy now, and the finish is butterscotch candy, like one of those Brach's candies everyone's grandma had that was fused together in a small ceramic dish.  There must have been a generational shift that happened in the mid-1960s that no one talks about where people stopped eating hard candy and moved to small bite sized chocolates.  I don't know why the Beatles, Vietnam protests and Woodstock get all the talk for generational attitude shift when it clearly was the move away from Brach's hard candies that was the most impactful in Middle America.  Anyway, Wine 2 is the Yellow Tail.  I'm pretty sure.  Sometimes a Macon can be made in a blowsy style, but I can't see the Yellow Tail being either wine 1 or 3.  Wine two is just way too ripe and has the least amount of acid.  

I go back and forth between wine 1 and 3.  The first wine has some oomph in the midpalate and the acid is decidedly medium.  There is a little bitter hint at the finish.  Is that a hint of oak from a used barrel or is it "minerality"?  At this point I don't know if the Chablis producer has used any neutral barrels with aging.  I know it's a high priced wine, so it's a distinct possibility he's using a percentage.  I slide over to wine 3.  There isn't as much body here, and there's less primary fruit.  The finish is really clean with a wet oyster shell thing.  My notes have this as having medium plus acid.   This has to be the Chablis.  Final answer.  Wine 1 Macon Villages.  Wine 2. Yellow Tail.  Wine 3.  Chablis.  Wine 4 Santa Rita Hills.  I diligently write about how these wines all fit into the international marketplace based on this identification.

I finish and do The Reveal.  Fuck.  I flip flopped the Chablis and the Macon.  This is a very common mistake.  It's two wines that don't allow for oak usage to help guide the answer, and I have misinterpreted the concentration of the Chablis for warmer climate as opposed to higher quality.  I wait for 20 minutes and circle back to the wines.  The Macon is showing a floral quality on the nose, and without question has less acid than the Chablis.  The mistake in the analysis was due to the fucking Yellow Tail.  As wine 2 is Yellow Tail, it has the lowest acid and the most alcohol.  When I tasted wine 3, I was comparing it to the Yellow Tail's level of acid, therefore giving the Macon medium + acidity.  Compared to the Yellow Tail, the Macon felt crisp and lean.  I allowed my initial note on the acid to override my sense that Wine 1 was clearly the better quality wine.  Dammit.  

This mistake would have been costly.  I would have scored decent points putting the wines both in the Old world and in France, but once I took the cool climate Chablis to Macon and vice versa, that would have been bad.  On the upside, the method of production was similar and as that would not have killed me.  However, when I'm referring to a Macon Village at $18 as a luxury wine fought for between collectors like a jeweled vase, this would have been a real problem.  Meanwhile in my answer I have this expensive ass Chablis being poured at VIP sports arena boxes and seaside beach cafes.  Ouch.  I would have scored heavy points in my Yellow Tail/The Hilt answers, but this section would have been a "he's still alive in the exam, but he can't fuck anything else up" situation.  

The good news is to anyone that knows me and lives nearby is I will be opening a decent amount of white Burgundy over the next few months.  Swing on by and I'll give you a blind.  I just bought a couple of frightfully expensive bottles to use as trainers (You're welcome Vincent) as I am going to throw myself into a Chablis/Meursault/Macon three wine training regimen until I stop bungling this answer.  I've got a household that leans into oak, so I don't drink a lot of Chablis.  I know a guy in the program that dove into Chablis as his RAMS final paper after passing tasting.  He's going to harshly scold me for not being able to effortlessly pick a Chablis out of a lineup.  Of course, he's also been drinking Raveneau like Gatorade so he's got a bit of an edge on me.  I'll tell you what.  There's no way he can call a Geneva OH Marechal Foch or a Finger Lakes Leon Millot like me.

I trudge onward.