Why Chardonnay is the world’s most planted white wine grape
Le Fat Bastard is a prime example of why chardonnay excels in so many styles and climates: The trick is in the mouthfeel, which is all about tactile opulence.
Le Fat Bastard Chardonnay
Languedoc, France
$11.49 13.5% alcohol
PLCB Item # 6177
Sale price through May 4; regularly $13.49
Chardonnay is the world’s most widely planted white wine grape, thanks in part to its broad stylistic range. Where most prestige grapes hang their hat on a single flavor profile, chardonnay can excel at almost every variation a green-skinned grape can be used to make, from sparkling blanc de blancs to flinty, unoaked Chablis to the richly oaked and buttery chardonnays of California. Chardonnay’s supremacy is driven by two simple but rarely spoken truths about this golden grape. First, chardonnay is relatively cheap and easy to grow. Second, what makes chardonnay pleasant to drink has more to do with its texture on the palate — its mouthfeel — than with its flavor.
By any calculation, chardonnay ranks among the very finest wine grapes, making both the world’s most expensive white wines in Burgundy and its most expensive bubbles in Champagne. Unlike its peers like cabernet sauvignon or pinot noir, chardonnay adapts easily to both warm and cool climates and is capable of making noble wines at both ends of the ripeness spectrum. Even the most brisk early-harvested chardonnays deliver a mouth-filling tactile opulence, and it is this trait more than any other that makes chardonnay wines like this one so popular.
Chardonnay’s richness of texture is front and center in this value-oriented wine from the south of France. First produced in 1995 as an experimental cuvée that was aged longer than usual on its lees, or spent yeast sediment, Fat Bastard quickly became the top selling French chardonnay in the United States thanks to its fleshy, buttery style. Today’s Fat Bastard still smells and tastes mainly of snappy apple juice but with the creaminess and spice of a decadent homemade eggnog, making it spectacular with anything you might top with lemon butter.
Also available at:
Canal’s of Berlin Discount Liquor Mart, Berlin, $8.99
Total Wine & More, Cherry Hill, $9.37
Wine Legend Cherry Hill, $10.49