Chardonnay on the way ... out

I am getting inundated with requests for white wine like crazy but very little of it is Chardonnay! I have been watching this trend for about a year now and the former queen of white wine grapes is getting pushed aside at an alarming rate.

Such historically unknown white wines such as Viognier, Grillo, Pinot Gris and Trebbiano are being asked for on an everyday basis while the once noble lady is being shunned. When I ask people about why they are no longer drinking Chardonnay or are cutting back to different white wines for the time being, the word that comes to the lips most frequently is, "Boring!"

For a guy who has been retailing wine for 40 years, this comes as a never-ending shock. Chardonnay has been the standard white wine selection of the West Coast wine business seemingly forever and it appears that this might be coming to an end. Let's look at a few possible reasons.

Glut: Not only are there many Chardonnay to choose from, there are too many Chardonnay to choose from! Chardonnay is coming to us from all over the world, including nations which never had Chardonnay as a cultural staple. This is happening because folks were trying to get on the Chardonnay bandwagon while the getting was good.

Countries (for example) such as Argentina and Chile, known for their red wines, got in the act (in a big way) in the early 1990s and never backed off. This is also true of Italy, where Chardonnay was unheard of until about the middle of the '90s. In fact, Chardonnay, that great native of Burgundy, France, was something of an anathema to Italian vintners. The thought of putting a French varietal on Italian soil ruffled more than a few Italian winemakers.

This glut was the mothership of perfectly marginal to really bad Chardonnay. Folks who had no business making this wine uprooted existent vines to make a fast buck on the name and poured on the unsuspecting wine buyer this marginal fruit and bad winemaking, which still haunts us today. Large wineries in California also began making very ordinary Chardonnay, some with a little bit of residual sugar to bring out the vanilla and fruit tones. These banana-apple-tropical Chardonnays were seen all over the shelves and scored big with the uninitiated consumer.

Consumer savvy: Here's the rub! Wine consumers are getting fed up with this ocean of marginal fruit and are simply beginning to back off for the more crisp styles, native vines and wines that will actually go well with cuisine instead of these juicy-fruit spice bombs that are only good for drinking without food and served iced almost to crystals!

This generation, as well as our adult children's generation, are getting hip to preparing food at home, watching the food channels and understanding that there are other superb offerings out there in wineland that will very nicely go well with food. Last night I saw two food pairing shows that featured Arneis from the Piemonte region of Italy, as well as Orvieto from Umbria. This is big and heady stuff and deserves to be mentioned. (I'd bet that these same shows 10 years ago would have sung the Chardonnay song over and over again.)

Advertising: Here, we are seeing a big change from Chardonnay to other white wine varieties. Any wine magazine or food magazine on the stands is now showing us the tremendous range of other white wine grapes available to us from around the world. Where the advertising pages were filled with glossy photos of Chardonnay, we are now seeing ads for the other guys, as well as long articles devoted to the "new" white wines of the world (which aren't "new" at all but newly discovered.)

Retail space: The shelves used to be groaning with seemingly endless rows of Chardonnay. Today we are seeing Pinot Grigio, Orvieto, dry Riesling, dry Gewerztraminer and Pinot Blanc. The consumer is trying these wines and liking them and (more importantly) going back again and again to try these new little gems from different suppliers and vintage dates. The handwriting is on the wall!

Time for you to take the plunge, as well. You will not be disappointed! See you next week.