Where is chardonnay grown

Many areas that are prime for Chardonnay production are also prone to spring frosts. If you can put the vineyard on a higher elevation with a spot for the cold air to drain, you will save yourself a lot of hassles. I usually recommend at least 6 feet 1. Remember the one-to-one rule: you need as much room in between vine rows as the height of the fully mature canopy. So most canopies reach about 6 feet 1.

This principle is vital to Chardonnay, as shaded fruit can develop an olive or canned veggie character, which will thus affect the wine. My suggestions for ordering your vines are the following cultivars of Chardonnay: 76, 96 newer Dijon clones or Wente more of an older California selection, but may be harder to find.

I find these make the best Chardonnays again and again in the proper locations. A trellis system that uses sets of catch wires to direct all growth vertically up is a good way to grow fruit that is properly exposed to sun and causes the wind to blow through the fruit zone to keep mildew and rot pressure down.

You can also easily clear weeds from the vine row in just a few hours with a hoe. Powdery mildew really loves Chardonnay. Make sure to start spraying wettable sulfur at about 4 inches 10 cm average shoot growth after budbreak, and spray every seven to ten days for the first few years to get mildew under control. After bunch closure you may want to move to stylet oil, and spray on a seven-day interval. After a few years of mildew-free farming, you can add a day to the interval as long as all the fruit and vines stay clean.

Botrytis also likes Chardonnay, so you may want to add some copper sulfate to your first few sulfur sprays, which will slow down early season Botrytis and also help a bit with frost protection. Ten percent or less of Botrytis spores on fruit going into the crusher is not a big deal. A kiss of Botrytis in Chardonnay adds a lovely honeyed, nutty character, even in a dry wine. Chardonnay, like all grapevines, needs to develop a strong root system to be able to ripen a crop, pull up water and nutrients.

I suggest cutting the vines back to two buds after their first year in the ground so that the first year is all about root growth, the second year is about developing the trunk, and then the first crop comes off in either the third or fourth year depending on vigor. Chardonnay can really be improved by proper canopy management.

Commercially acceptable Chardonnay can be produced in really quite hot wine regions such as the hot interiors of California, South Africa and Australia where clever winemaking can give it tropical fruit flavours and even some suggestion of oakiness, often using oak chips.

In cooler wine regions such as Chablis, Carneros and Tasmania, on the other hand, it can produce apple-crisp juice which, in less ripe years, can have rapier-like acidity. The best examples can benefit from five or even more years in bottle to soften that acidity and develop rounder flavours to balance it — although less concentrated examples produced in cool years may simply taste even leaner as the bloom of youth fades.

Excluding premier cru and grand cru burgundy, Chardonnay does not make wines for seriously long ageing. Perhaps Chardonnay's most distinctive role in cooler climate regions is as a vital ingredient in top-quality sparkling wine, especially champagne.

Although in most champagne it is blended with Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier , Blanc de Blancs champagne which is made exclusively of Chardonnay shows that it can produce elegant, lively, savoury fizz all by itself.

What the dark-skinned Pinots tend to add is not colour but ballast, or body. Ambitious producers of sparkling wine the world over tend to depend on Chardonnay to add class to their wines. There is something about the elusive flavours of Chardonnay that marries particularly well with the traditional champagne-making process, involving extended ageing with the residues of a second fermentation in bottle, making a much deeper, denser sparkling wine than one based on, say, Chenin Blanc as in the Loire or Riesling as in some top quality Sekt.

The wines of Chablis in northern Burgundy, one of France's coolest wine regions, have a very particular flavour. It reminds me of wet stones, with some suggestion of very green fruit, but without the strong aroma and lean build of a Sauvignon Blanc.

Because of its latitude, Chablis does not easily ripen the Chardonnay on which it exclusively depends. Chablis can age superbly. Sappy and refreshing in youth, it typically goes through a rather awkward adolescent stage where it can take on some odd wet wool odours and then, in glorious maturity at about 10 to 15 years old, it is an extraordinarily appetising drink reminiscent of wet stones and oatmeal.

In more temperate climates Chardonnay can yield some of the finest dry white wine in the world. Indeed, the truly thrilling thing about Chardonnay grown on the Cote d'Or is that here, as nowhere else, it can express a sense of place, even if winemaking — which for top-quality Chardonnay produced anywhere almost invariably includes fermentation and maturation in different sorts of oak barrels; a second, softening malolactic fermentation; and different levels of stirring, or ' batonnage ', of the lees at the bottom of the barrel — inevitably superimposes itself too — sometimes too much.

Oak can be tasted in clumsier examples in the form of a certain toastiness, char — or even vanilla flavours in the case of American rather than the more normal French oak favoured by Burgundian wine producers. Typical Meursault tends to be butter-golden and a little heavier and earlier-maturing than a typical wine from 'The Montrachets' as the villages would doubtless be called in Britain which has more lean, pure, nuanced character capable of developing for up to a decade in bottle, while Corton-Charlemagne can be nutty, almost almond-flavoured.

Chardonnay is an early budding variety and thus must be protected from spring frosts in locations where such frosts are likely. However, it resists rather well to cold winter temperatures. Chardonnay must be planted with tight spacing high density in cold and temperate regions. In contrast, it can be planted with wide spacing low density in hot areas, but it is likely to give low yields unless it is irrigated during the summer.

Under both types of conditions, lyre-shaped trellising is being attempted. Chardonnay vines must be trained on a trellis.

This variety can be harvested properly by machine. In cool and temperate regions, cane pruning is advised in order to give satisfactory yields. In hot and sunny regions such as California, spur pruning with two buds per spur is possible, since these conditions produce significantly larger clusters than in cooler climates. Chardonnay is very sensitive to shot-berry production under poor weather conditions during flowering cold, rain. Chardonnay is also very sensitive to the fanleaf degeneration virus yellow mosaic and malformations.

As plantings of Chardonnay have increased internationally, the causal mycoplasma-like organism has spread in recent years from the Armagnac region to the South of France, Italy and all the way to Moldavia ex-USSR. This disease cannot spread to Burgundy and Champagne because of the absence of the leafhopper vector in these regions. While some of it comes down to the winemaking process, a lot of the flavors you are picking up have to do with the region and climate where the chardonnay was produced.

When considering climates for wine cultivation as a wine professional, I put wine into three general climate categories: cool, moderate, and warm. Each of these general climates is a powerful influencer in the finished wine.

For example, Chardonnay from a warmer climate will exhibit ripe, tropical fruits, and muted levels of acidity. While Chardonnay grown in a cooler climate will produce tart, citrus fruits that are aromatic with distinguished acid levels. Chardonnay is the most well-known white wine in the world. With all this popularity, it is widely planted in an array of different climates.

Not only is it grown in most regions of the wine world, the style that each region produces has its own fan base. These villages have the enchanting combination of kimmeridgian soil, climate, and history to produce some of the most renown chardonnays in the world.