If I had a dollar for every winery that told me their sweet, oaky Chardonnay was made in a Chablis mould, I would be buying Necker Island off Richard Branson.
Yet, a clutch of unoaked New Zealand Chardonnays has landed on my doorstep recently and they make for some pretty delicious drinking. New Zealand has a cool, maritime climate, imbuing the country’s wines with an invigorating freshness. Kiwi whites are marked by a crystalline purity of fruit and oak can be an unnecessary distraction. There’s nothing to suggest that unwooded Chardonnay wouldn’t be successful as a wine style.
Drinkers seem to be ripe for it too: unoaked Chardonnay from New Zealand offers the freshness of Sauvignon Blanc, its biggest export, and the non-aromatic character of Pinot Gris, which is enjoying its time in the sun.
Sacred Hill has been making butt naked Chardonnay, a.k.a The Virgin, since 2011 (read more about it here) and Nelson’s Neudorf is one of the latest to offer up a Chardonnay without frills. They’d be in my top ten Chardonnay producers in New Zealand so, along with Kumeu River, whose Village Chardonnay is near as dammit unwooded, there’s a small trickle of the country’s best giving this style a bash.
Michael Brajkovich MW, winemaker at Kumeu River, explains: “In the past most of our Village Chardonnay has always been made in stainless steel tanks and then blended with a small portion from old oak, so we have been making this style of unwooded Chardonnay for a long time. There is no reason why it should not be all from tank, but if you tell people it’s unwooded it seems to be a turn-off.
Sacred Hill winemaker Tony Bish agrees unwooded Kiwi Chardonnay suffered from a poor reputation. The category had been going great guns in the late ‘90s and early 2000s but “the whole genre got a bit overplayed,” he said. “It ended up being a not-very-flash vinous grocery wine selling under $15 and that tainted the category.”
Then there’s the competition circuit, where delicate, understated wines get overwhelmed by the fruit and oak bombs. “Oaky Chardonnay wins awards. It [the Virgin Chardonnay] has not got a shitshow of winning a gold medal in a line up of Chardonnays,” he added.
Gold medals weren’t on the minds of Neudorf owners Tim and Judy Finn when they launched their first unoaked Chardonnay, 25 Rows this year; this Chardonnay is about an unadulterated expression of their vineyards.
Thankfully they are “loathe to make comparisons with other regions, particularly one that has such a unique style, climate and soil such as Chablis. But we can, and should, use them as inspiration.”
A quartet of unoaked Kiwi Chardonnays to try
2013 Neudorf 25 Rows Chardonnay, Nelson
2013 Sacred Hill, The Virgin Chardonnay, Hawke’s Bay
