Say what?!? A Chardonnay on my list? Dirt Candy doesn’t have much room for storage and so I can only have about 8 wines on the wine list at a time. When the restaurant opened my plan was to highlight wines that were really unique and to stay away from Syrahs and Rieslings and Chardonnays. How did a *gag* Chardonnay of all things wind here? It’s my least favorite varietal in the world, and one of the most boring wines on the planet, IMHO. So what happened? Well, I found a Chardonnay that blew me away, Les Graviers 2007.

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Okay, it’s a 2005 in the picture. Sorry!

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By the time they die, every North American adult has consumed 200 gallons of bad Chardonnay. It gets into your system at wedding receptions, at art gallery openings, at book parties, on cruises. Wherever someone is serving free wine, chances are it’s bad Chardonnay. And bad Chardonnay tastes like big oak.

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But Les Graviers 2007 tastes like pure Chardonnay with an intense vegetable taste: grass, carrots, some nuttiness. There’s even a bit of a mineral undercurrent to it. And no oak. This is the intense, unadulterated taste of the French Chardonnay grape, and drinking this wine reminds you of why people fell in love with Chardonnay in the first place. Nowadays, most Chardonnay comes from California and they love to oak it up out West, but Les Graviers comes from the Jura region of France, a tiny wine-producing area near the Swiss border that derives its name from the Jurassic Era (and the nearby Jura Mountains). It is almost certain that dinosaurs drank this wine.

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“This wine is corked! Send it back!”

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The vines for this Chardonnay date back to the Middle Ages. Not as old as dinosaurs, but getting close. The vineyard Domaine André et Mireille Tissot is run by Stephane Tissot, a young guy who is returning to traditional methods of making wine, and who runs the vineyard biodynamically. His return to his roots is one of the reasons that Les Graviers tastes like traditional Chardonnay and not like the modern over-oaked varieties.

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Home of Les Graviers Chardonnay.

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For a long time, the most expensive red I sold was the Kanonkop Pinotage and it was unrivaled as one of the most impressive wines I’ve ever tasted. The Les Graviers Chardonnay comes close. And if it was good enough for the dinosaurs, it’s good enough for me.

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More vineyard porn from Stephane Tissot’s vineyard.

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Official website

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