Chardonnay has No Taste. Here’s Why

The Wizards of Wine

Winemakers and magicians are indistinguishable. You never really know how the trick is done. It is worth remembering though, that the Wizard of OZ was all powerful only as you didn’t look behind the curtain.

A lot of the wine business is based on illusion from the guy behind the curtain.

You taste what you’re told to taste even though you may not realize it. Somebody says strawberries’ and suddenly you’re smelling strawberries where there were none before.

“What do think?”

“It reminds me of ‘06. (Sniffing again). Yep. Overtones of cactus bristles.”

“Really?”

(Now you’re sniffing too, trying to find overtones of cactus bristles.”)

“Definitely. First planted by the Karankawa on South Galveston Island during the Great Winter of ‘98 I believe. (Big sniffs)

“This is a great wine.”

It tastes like gasoline to you but suddenly you’re starting to get hints of greatness.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” ― W.B. Yeats

Wine is chock full of illusions. “Extra Dry” Champagne is sweeter than “Dry” (Brut) Champagne. Hillside Vineyards are actually in valleys.

Sugar leaks into all kinds of “dry” wines—high alcohol Cabernets, high alcohol Chardonnays, “big” Zinfandels. Things are seldom what they seem.

Just like magic tricks, you applaud the trick, not the truth.

The illusion is the point.

Worcester in the Snow

In the winter of 1984, I accidentally became the second human being to experience a brand new smell that had never existed before in the history of the world.

I was sitting in a dark lab at Millapore Corporation in Worcester, Massachusetts outside of Boston. Millapore was and is a world leader in industrial filters. They supplied the filters for N.A.S.A. space launches and the moon walk.

When I showed up, Millapore had just completed the first experiments ever done with effect of reverse osmosis filters on wine. I had nothing to do with that— our winemaker at the time was the one who thought of it and set it up.

He was looking for a cheaper way to stabilize proteins in wine than the egg whites that were traditional. I was just in the neighborhood and what with Boston being closer to Worcester than San Jose, California, I was sent to go check out the results.

Curiously, Millapore had removed all the alcohol from the wine samples on the basis of its molecular weight. All the wine molecules ended up on one side of the filter, all the alcohol molecules on the other.

As it happens, I am the second person in the world to have tasted, well, smelled, “pure” wine that had the alcohol taken out of it without altering the rest of the wine. The nice man in the white lab coat at Millipore was the first person.

And, he didn’t drink.

What he had made was fermented grape juice without the sugar. Such a thing never existed before.

The nice man at Millapore was very helpful. He was standing in the door and as he left the room he turned, looked me in the eye and told me to smell, but not to taste, the samples on account of tasting them would kill me.

I, for one, believed him. He was not a man given to metaphor.

It was a revelation.

“There’s no there there.” —Gertrude Stein

The Great Chardonnay Trick

I shall now tell you something you probably won’t believe, but which is true anyway.

As you probably already know, Chardonnay is the grape used to make some of the greatest white wines in the world. Le Montrachet, Corton, Meursault—all are as good as wine gets. There are lots of others.

The thing is, Chardonnay doesn’t actually taste like Chardonnay. It has no taste.

Try dropping that casually into the conversation at your next wine tasting and see what reaction you get. Frank and lively discussion will follow. Possibly physical violence.

The cries of outrage you hear is from wine experts, including winemakers, all over the world. But alas, dear reader, these “experts” never took the alcohol out of Chardonnay so they don’t know what Chardonnay tastes like when it’s just Chardonnay.

Uninfluenced by the alcohol.

It wasn’t even possible to know until 1984. Just Chardonnay molecules, no alcohol molecules. Raw Chardonnay.

There are only a handful of people in the world who have ever actually tasted (smelled actually) Chardonnay without alcohol before it’s messed with.

Commercial non alcoholic Chardonnays are doctored with “natural flavors” and extra sugar. Sometimes oak additives. Or liquid smoke. That makes it a wine-like flavored beverage, but it doesn’t make it wine. Much less Chardonnay.

So, experts think they know, but they don’t know. How could they? They’ve never tasted it.

Hardly anybody has.

I hear the rumble of dissent in the back of the room.

What about your own winery, Larry? Didn’t you make a Chardonnay without alcohol? Hmmm? Didn’t you?

Yeah, we did.

It sucked.

Even tap water tastes like chlorine. We couldn’t even manage that.

Mark Wilson and “the lovely Nani Darnell”, the first major TV magician and his wife

I have here in my right hand…

It’s a matter of distraction, just like a magician. Tell the audience to watch what’s happening in your right hand while the left hand is doing tricky stuff.

Olfactory distraction instead of visual distraction (how do all those bunnies get in the hat?).

When people think they are tasting Chardonnay they are tasting a lot of things, but none of it is Chardonnay. Complexities of taste come from fermentation techniques, aging in wood barrels, bottle aging and sometimes concentration of the juice from techniques like flash detente (it’s a specific kind of way to press grapes) or reverse osmosis or the spinning cone.

We produced Chardonnay, with all its molecules intact, but without the alcohol. If you have not tasted Chardonnay after it is run through reverse osmosis filtration, or some similar technology, then you don’t know what Chardonnay tastes like on its own.

If you really want to know, Chardonnay wines mostly tastes like oak extracted from different kinds of barrels with different levels of char and sometimes tannins. In addition, it frequently tastes of a yeast infection—Brettanomyces—which in small amounts adds “complexity”, i.e. taste.

Or, so the French say. In large amounts it smells like sweat and would drop a bull elephant in mid stride.

Chardonnay wines may also taste like Diacetyl, which is produced in fermentation and gives butter, as well as wine, its butter taste. “Buttery” is a favorite descriptor of Chardonnay among those in the know. It’s a good thing. But, it has nothing to do with the grape. It has to do with the fermentation process.

These days, you can’t taste pure Chardonnay because no one does that. They know what we learned. Non alcoholic Chardonnay will never taste like real wine. They will always suck until somebody invents an alcohol substitute.

There is a really, really big market for an alcohol substitute that works. Good luck with that.

I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore toto

There are some really great wines you can produce without alcohol, but Chardonnay is not among them.

For instance, our white blend became the first (and only) non alcoholic wine in history to win a gold medal against wines with alcohol at the L.A. County Fair. Then, they banned us from the contests.

Poor losers, I say.

But, Chardonnay is a great illusion. It even fools the magicians. We see, or in this case taste, what we look for.

In wine, like magic, the illusion is the point.

Ultimately though, wine is still magic. Science has produced better wines with more consistency and great wines from good but not great vineyards. But, the greatness itself is magic.

Illusions are not all bad. The truth is overrated.

But, it can be useful.