October 6, 1999

Aging doesn't always kill white wines by Laurie Daniel

ANYONE who's been collecting wine for a number of years probably has a few forgotten bottles. In my case, I had about two dozen chardonnays, both domestic and French, from the early and mid-1980s. Conventional wisdom holds that most dry white wine should be consumed within a few years of release. And I've noticed that many of my chardonnays from the late '80s and even the early to mid-'90s are already fading. So I expected that most of these older bottles would be dead.

Still, tasting these wines presented a good educational opportunity. So my friend George assembled a few fellow wine nuts, and we tasted 18 of my old chardonnays. The oldest was from the 1978 vintage; the most youthful bottles were from 1987. All had been stored in a temperature-controlled environment. The wines were tasted blind - that is, we didn't know what wine was in what glass. My husband and I were the only people who even knew what wines were in the tasting.

To the surprise of nearly everyone there, many of the wines were holding up extremely well. I thought the best wines were some of the oldest - and they were from California, not France. (A caveat here: When I was buying wines in the 1980s, I bought chardonnays from some of the top California wineries, but the few French wines in the tasting were from lesser producers. One was a Meursault-Charmes I had hand-carried home after a visit to a tiny winery in Burgundy.)

My favorite wines were the 1980 Grgich Hills and the 1981 Stony Hill. Despite being nearly 20 years old, both were amazingly youthful and fresh, with lots of tangy acidity. (The Stony Hill had a bit of mustiness at first, but that rapidly dissipated.) Two younger Grgich Hills wines - from 1986 and 1987 - had also fared well, although the '86 had taken on a nutty quality.

Actually, it didn't surprise me that the Stony Hill was holding its own. Those chardonnays have a reputation for aging extremely well. They're at their best with a few years of age on them. I've had several bottles of the 1989 Stony Hill lately, and it's just about at its peak.

What the Stony Hill and Grgich Hills chardonnays have in common, even the current releases, is that they don't undergo malolactic fermentation, a secondary fermentation in which the grapes' sharper malic acid is converted into a softer, more buttery lactic acid. The process, also referred to as ML, is used in vast numbers of chardonnays these days, especially expensive ones. Sometimes all the wine is put through ML, sometimes just a portion of the final blend is.

"I think the big thing is that we don't do malolactic fermentation and we don't use a lot of new wood," says Stony Hill winemaker Mike Chelini, explaining why his chardonnays are so age-worthy. The wines are fermented and aged in mostly older French oak barrels. New oak, Chelini says, "burns the fruit out." He also credits the winery's hillside vineyard, which gets only morning and midday sun, allowing the grapes to ripen slowly and retain good levels of acidity. "More acidity makes a wine that's more stable," he says.

Many of today's chardonnays are big, oaky, rich wines, Chelini notes, made to be drunk upon release. By contrast, he says, "I think five years is the time to start drinking" Stony Hill chardonnay.