Some drinks will forever be associated with a time and place. It's hard for me to pour a glass of bourbon without imagining myself in Jazz Age America, or a scotch on the rocks without thinking I'm a Don Draper figure in early s New York. And no gently nostalgic documentary about 70s Britain is complete without a jokey reference to Watneys Party Sevens or Blue Nun. I've no doubt that chardonnay will be the liquid representative of our age. Glossy, rich and loud in flavour, it was as closely identified with the 90s and early s as Britpop, Blair and Bridget Jones who, of course, drank it by the bucketload.
The gaudy, golden accompaniment to a million conversations about rising house prices, it came to dominate sales of white wine, its cultural reach so profound that it briefly became a popular girls' name. The UK was not alone in falling for chardonnay. By and large they were attempting to make wines in the same style as the Australians and Californians who had done so well out of the variety — a kind of white burgundy-on-steroids based on super-ripe tropical fruit, oak either from barrels or the addition of oak chips and the buttery notes and texture associated with malolactic fermentation, a winemaking process that converts the tart malic acid into softer lactic acid.
For many people this style has come to represent all that chardonnay can be. And that caricature no longer fits with drinking fashions. According to the market researchers Nielsen, sales of chardonnay have stagnated.
The sad thing about all this, however, is that the stereotypical chardonnay is largely a thing of the past. Chardonnay producers around the world are now much more likely to emphasise freshness and use oak with restraint or not at all.
As Tesco wine buyer James Griswood puts it: "We have certainly seen a move towards fresher, lighter, more "zippy" styles of white wines and we've adjusted our range of chardonnays accordingly. Nowhere has this trend been more pronounced than in Australia, which accounts for around half of all the chardonnay we drink in the UK. But even mainstream brands and supermarket labels are now with some exceptions less like clumsy sawdust-and-pineapple cocktails than they once were.
