A Dry (Cheap) White Season

She asked what I’d like. I asked if she had red wine.

“Not any more,” said the flight attendant. “We used to. They took it off. I don’t know why. I only drink red wine myself. Now there’s just Chardonnay and White Zinfandel.”

I ordered the Chardonnay. It came in a plastic cup. The color was vaguely yellowish-brown. It was oxidized. I asked her who made it.

“Blossom Hill.”

I winced.

The wine, offered in small 187-milliliter bottles by Southwest Airlines, was awful. And I immediately recalled the good old days in California, the days before Chardonnay ruined white table wine as we know it. It was a time when white wine was clean and dry, and wasn’t all mucked up with things winemakers think consumers want.

Inexpensive dry white wine--decent honest stuff that would sell for $3 or less a bottle--will never come back, I fear. The public now seeks Chardonnay and winemakers cater to this demand, even though it is next to impossible to make it very well and still keep it cheap.

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Fifteen years ago, Chardonnay was nothing more than a dry, complex dinner wine that sold for $8 to $12. Today Chardonnay is, for most people, generic white wine. When the barkeep asks what’ll ya have, the answer for most patrons is “Chardonnay.” But people in lounges don’t really want Chardonnay. They really want “any white wine, as long as it’s sweet and so cold I can barely taste it.” But what they say is “Chardonnay.”

Chardonnay is an expensive grape, and expensive to make well. So rarely does a $5 Chardonnay contain much more than the federally mandated minimum of 75% of Chardonnay grape juice (and that Chardonnay percentage is usually blah). Much of the remaining 25% is bought on the bulk wine market. Little of it would be very interesting on its own, and some is actually undrinkable. In a blend, the negative qualities are muted, but if the result is not technically flawed, neither is it very tasty.

Demand for this kind of plonk doomed dry white wine. I remember the early 1980s when you could still get a decent bottle of dry white. My favorites were Beaulieu Chablis, Fetzer Premium White, Heitz Chablis, Parducci Chablis, and my favorite, Wente Chablis. I paid $1.99 a bottle for them and relished their crisp acid and racy fruit--not to mention the lack of oak.

This was tasty wine that was truly dry, didn’t seek to be something it wasn’t and went fairly well with food.

But dry white fell victim, oddly enough, to the surplus of Chardonnay that developed in 1983-84. Back then, there were 22,000 acres of Chardonnay in California as well as lots of Riesling, Chenin Blanc and French Colombard. Chardonnay sold slowly so a surplus developed. The late Bruno Benziger of Glen Ellen Vineyards in Sonoma County took advantage of the “wine lake” to produce a Chardonnay that sold for $3 a bottle.

He could do this because there was so much bulk Chardonnay around that the price for it was artificially low.

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To make this wine appealing to the broad-market U.S. wine buyer, Glen Ellen made the wine soft and slightly sweet. It caught on.

As this category of “Fighting Varietal” wines increased in volume and others entered the fray, the wine lake dried up. At the same time, the cost of all wine began to rise through the 1980s. First came taxation. Government-imposed “sin taxes” on alcoholic beverages hit wine heavily. The various taxes on wine today are more than $3 a case, more than triple a decade ago.

Since 1983, the cost of glass bottles nearly doubled, to $4 per case. The price of corks, which averaged a nickel each in 1984, rose to almost $1.50 per case.

Add in other, similar, costs and suddenly we’re talking about a cost of nearly $1 per bottle--not including the wine inside or the cost of storing it, shipping it and selling it.

As costs rose and the consumer continued to demand $5 Chardonnay, more and more Chardonnay was planted. Today some 60,000 acres of Chardonnay is in the ground, much of it poor quality stuff growing in warm regions.

But bad Chardonnay grapes still sell for more than excellent Colombard grapes, so growers were happy to tear out other varieties to plant Chardonnay. What disappeared was much of that wonderful, fresh, tasty Riesling, Chenin Blanc and Colombard that once were the heart of California’s dry white table wine.

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Today we have lots of dull, uninteresting Chardonnays with little or no character and we have no Wente Chablis, no Heitz Chablis. There are few white table wines that are as crisp or delicate as they once were.

The Blossom Hill Chardonnay is just one example of how far Chardonnay has deteriorated.

In January, I tasted 20 lower-priced Chardonnays in 1.5-liter bottles bought off store shelves. Prices ranged from $7 to $9 a bottle. I liked none of them.

Only three were even drinkable--1992 M.G. Vallejo Winery “Harvest Select,” 1992 Cook’s American “Captain’s Reserve,” and 1990 Monte Verde “Classic Reserve.” There was nothing exciting here, just white wine that wasn’t terrible, but not much reminiscent of Chardonnay either.

Most of the others were too sweet, marred by extraneous flavors or coarse.

Some wines showed the character of grapes other than Chardonnay (1992 Emerald Bay and nonvintage Cribari were like Riesling; nonvintage Blossom Hill was like Chenin Blanc). A couple of wines were oxidized (1992 Paul Masson, 1991 Delicato).

Fie on cheap Chardonnay. Bring back clean, dry white.