Chardonnay

Chardonnay’s parentage, revealed by DNA typing in the 1990s, is wine’s best rags-to-riches story: Pinot Noir crossed with Gouais Blanc — a grape so lowly that medieval France repeatedly tried to ban it. From the noble parent came finesse; from the peasant one, vigour and adaptability. That adaptability is the grape’s whole character: Chardonnay grows almost anywhere and does almost anything it’s told, which is precisely how it ended up wearing too much oak. It doesn’t resist bad ideas. It executes them flawlessly.

Australia’s first commercial varietal Chardonnay is widely credited to the Hunter Valley— Tyrrell’s Vat 47, first vintage 1971. Within twenty years the grape had colonised every region in the country.

Margaret River’s advantage is a happy accident of plant material. Much of its Chardonnay descends from the Gingin clone, which suffers chronically from millerandage — “hen and chicken”, bunches of mixed large and tiny berries. A flaw on paper; in the glass, concentration. The small berries bring intensity and acid, the maritime climate brings evenness, and the result is Chardonnay with natural power that doesn’t need cosmetics. When the region’s flagship wines proved you could have richness and nerve, the rest of the country recalibrated around them.

The modern grammar — picked earlier, wild ferments, older and larger oak, the struck-match whiff of well-handled sulphides — was written across the cool south: the Yarra Valley and Adelaide Hills pushed the lean extreme, Tasmania supplied the acid line the sparkling houses covet, and Mornington Peninsula found the silk between the poles.

Today’s Australian Chardonnay smells of white peach, grapefruit pith and wet stone, with flint or struck match over the top and oak somewhere in the seams — seasoning, not sauce. The palate should be tense going in and generous coming out. If you meet butterscotch now, it’s a choice, not a default; a few makers keep a rich style alive on purpose, and done well it’s glorious — the pendulum has stopped swinging and settled into range.

That range is the tour: the same grape at six latitudes, from Hunter warmth to Tasmanian edge. No other variety shows Australian wine’s last thirty years so clearly in a single afternoon of tasting.