It’s not every day you’re sitting at a wine tasting and a penny drops inside your head. Yet that was the experience of most of those at Brian Croser’s recent chardonnay seminars at which Croser, the Kevin Sheedy of Australian wine, confirmed a fundamental truth about chardonnay. The term ‘grapefruit’ is commonly used to describe a taste of chardonnay from cooler climates. Croser showed that this taste actually results from a less than perfect ripening, when vines are over-cropped or otherwise unable to ripen their flavours correctly. Fully-ripened cool climate chardonnay should not display this character to any great extent. Chardonnay’s correct ripe primary fruit flavours, Croser explained, are ripe apple, pear and peach, possibly with lemon and mandarin if marginally less ripe. Over-ripe flavours expected from warmer to hot climates include fig, tropical fruit and pineapple, while if insufficiently ripened, chardonnay produces herbaceous, green apple or melon skin flavours – and grapefruit! I would add that this grapefruit character is not to be confused with the very desirable ripe ruby grapefruit flavour which is such a part of the best WA chardonnays. The hardest part of the seminar was to drag yourself away from the six most recent vintages of Petaluma chardonnay on display. Here, since many people cellar this wine, are my notes about them:
