Chardonnay Is Not Just Chardonnay_ A Quick Guide to the 3 Styles of White Burgundy

Wine-Searcher: The Word's Most Wanted White Burgundies

We all know Chardonnay is popular, but have you any idea how expensive it can be?

Hands up if you love Chardonnay. Now keep your hands up if you're willing to spend more than a grand on a bottle. Thought so.

Everyone loves Chardonnay, we all know that. The versatile, widely appealing grape variety is everywhere and remains madly popular despite gangs of vandals trying for decades to turn people away from it.

The pitchfork-waving ABC – Anything But Chardonnay – mob first appeared in the 1980s, decrying overly extracted, grotesquely overoaked wines and beseeching people to try Sauvignon Blanc instead. Or Riesling. Or Soave, or any of a hundred other varieties or styles. Even winemakers fell for it, with many altering their style in response to the utter drivel that was being written about Chardonnay in wine columns across the globe. Oak was cut back, levels of malolactic fermentation were eased, and the trend shifted towards bland, inoffensive wines that actually damaged the variety's reputation more than the previous excesses.

And yes, there was excess, especially among New World producers. Some Australian Chardonnays from the 1980s were vibrant yellow concoctions that looked like a liquidized canary and tasted like licking vanilla ice cream off a freshly cut plank. There were Californian wines that you could have spread on your morning toast and there were New Zealand wines that left consumers traumatized by the Wagnerian levels of overdramatization employed in their production. There was a lot to take issue with, although at least winemakers were trying to make something memorable.

Once the spoilsports had their way, Chardonnay was reduced to a muted, frequently unoaked level of blandness that paved the way for Pinot Gris to win over the legions of consumers who had decided that flavor was secondary to "a nice white wine".

Gradually, though, Chardonnay's renaissance began, as winemakers in the late 1990s and early 2000s gave themselves over entirely to a new adjective: Burgundian. Everyone wanted to make a Chardonnay that was "Burgundian", although frequently without any reference to which part of Burgundy was being discussed; Meursault? Corton? Montrachet? Chablis?

However, this harking back to a golden age of Burgundy was understandable. Burgundy is, after all, the home of Chardonnay and still produces the most sought-after, most well regarded and most expensive versions of the variety on the planet. It also produces a bewildering array of styles, from the simpler wines of Maconnais to the steely unoaked wines of Chablis; from the lush richness of Meursault and the flint-fruit melange of Corton-Charlemagne. Each white-wine appellation in Burgundy has its own unique flavor profile – and there are a lot of appellations.

Burgundy's wines are also – famously – the most expensive on earth. Certainly the top echelon of wines is ludicrously priced these days as collectors and trophy hunters compete to secure their share of the relatively tiny amounts produced each year. But the lower levels are also expensive and can also be hard to get hold of.

Let's see what canny collectors have been using Wine-Searcher's database to look for.

The World's Most Wanted White Burgundies on Wine-Searcher:

 

Possibly the strangest thing about this list (and there is a lot to unpick) is not what's there but what isn't. Some of the most famous producers of Burgundy are notably absent.

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, for example, has only one entry. Leroy and its subsidiary Domaine d'Auvenay are nowehere to be seen either (despite both being front and center in our most expensive and best lists), and the likes of Rousseau and Georges de Vogüe are likewise absent.

Instead it is something of a display case for the wines of Domaine Leflaive, with half the list coming from that winery. That may be down to the prices, which – by Burgundy standards – are positively reasonable. Three wines costing less than USD 1000 each? What were they thinking?

But despite some high prices, these are relatively affordable wines, certainly by comparison with their red counterparts, which can easily exceed USD 10,000 a bottle, a level only really attainable by the seriously wealthy. How long they remain "relatively affordable" is up for debate, however. All these wines saw substantial increases in their global average retail price over the past three years.

On average, the hike in the average retail price for each wine has been just shy of 73 percent, but the spread is not even. The two wines with the highest prices rose by the least amount (DRC was up by 39 percent, while the Coche Dury Corton-Charlemagne was up by 33 percent), but the others rose much more sharply. The Leflaive Clavoillon jumped by 93 percent, while the company's Puligny-Montrachet bottling rose by 92 percent.

The others all rose between 67 percent (the Bonneau du Martray) and 90 percent (the Leflaive Les Pucelles), suggesting that wines that would have represented tremendous value just three years ago are now in danger of soaring out of reach.

When it comes to white Burgundy, it's all very well loving it, the question is who's going to pay for it?

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