·S1 E182

Costco Kirkland Signature Challenge: Sonoma County Chardonnay!

Episode Transcript

Show Notes

Episode #182: Costco Kirkland Signature Challenge: Sonoma County Chardonnay! 00:00

Hello fellow wine Homies! And welcome to The Wine Pair Podcast. I’m Joe, your sommelier of reasonably priced wine, and this is my wife and my wine pairing partner in crime, Carmela. And we are The Wine Pair!

If you are new to our podcast, here is what you can expect. If you love wine and want to find great wines at affordable prices, and you want to expand your wine horizons, and you want to have some laughs and fun while doing it - then you are in the right place! Each week we explore a different wine varietal, style, brand, or region of the winemaking world, and learn about what makes them worth knowing about. And then we taste 2-3 of those wines that are reasonably priced to let you know if they are worth your hard earned money. If that feels like your vibe, then we are super happy you are here. And, we are proud to say that Decanter Magazine calls us fun, irreverent, chatty, and entertaining.

Carmela, this week’s tribe name comes from our new friends Angela and Heber, also known as the East Idaho Foodies, so let’s head over to the call we had with them and the name they chose. . .

Interview with Listeners East Idaho Foodies and Their Tribe Name 01:33

I will tell you, Angela and Heber are so nice, so fun, and we ended up talking for about half an hour about wine, life, kids, food, all sorts of fun stuff. I am loving talking to our listeners, and if you have an idea for a name and want to be on the show, just let us know.

Ok, back to the show. This week, Carmela, as we talked about in the intro, we are back with another Costco Kirkland Signature wine challenge, and again, I am feeling compelled to do it because the wine has been sitting in our wine cellar closet back room thing for too long. I can’t tell you how many months ago, but a while ago on one of our Costco dates I picked up a bottle of the Costco Kirkland Signature Sonoma County Chardonnay, and then two other bottles of similarly priced Chardonnay at Costco, so we could see if one of them comes out the winner.

And, for those of you who know us, you know that oaky Chardonnay is just not our thing - and we are going to talk about why Chardonnay in the US is so damn oaky. And, in an additional editorial comment, we do love unoaked Chardonnay, especially Chablis, so don’t think this is about Chardonnay hate per se, but rather specific dislike for the really oaky stuff. We used to be ABC - anything but Chardonnay - but now we are more open-minded. You could say awake to the possibilities, we have woken up to the potential of how wonderful Chardonnay can be. Dare we say we are woke? Or is it just better to be asleep.

But we are here to talk about Costco Kirkland Signature Sonoma County Chardonnay, and I have two more American Chardonnays we are going to pit it against to see which of them, if any, wins . . .

But first . . . we have to do our shameless plug.

Thank you for listening to us and for supporting our show, and if you haven’t had the chance to do so yet, now would be the perfect time to follow or subscribe to our podcast and leave us a nice rating and review to help us grow our listeners - and a huge thank you to all of you who have subscribed already!

You can also follow us on Instagram at thewinepairpodcast, and on Bluesky. You can contact us on our website thewinepairpodcast.com, and you can sign up for our email newsletter there and you can also visit our “Shop Wine” and “Shop Accessories” sections where you can find links to buy the wines that we rate as buys in each episode and accessories we think are great choices for wine lovers and as gifts, too.

And we want to make content you care about and you like, so send us a note or DM us and give us some feedback or let us know if there are wines you want us to try or wine making areas of the world you are curious about - and we’ll take care of it! joe@thewinepairpodcast.com

A shoutout to Justin L who appreciated we did the episode last week on Mencia, even though it as a screwed up tasting - but we are still alive!!!
A shoutout to Jared who sent us a note to correct us on some information we shared in the Chablis episode. Turns out that malolactic fermentation is used more than we said in Chablis, although I will say that the information from sources on the web is quite mixed.
Shoutout to Brandon, aka CRVD_brandeaux on IG - now he wants to try win try all the Costco wines, but we’ll see after this episode
Vinterainment podcast on IG (also Dave Baxter) who said we should get reimbursed for our moldy bottle.
Oregon Mobile Esthetics for loving listening to the show in the car

And, as we do every week, we’ll tell you someone we think you should recommend The Wine Pair Podcast to - because the best way for us to grow listeners is when you tell your family and friends about us - and this week, we want you to recommend us to anyone who loves an oaky Chardonnay and a bargain from Costco, because this episode may just tickle their fancy. (And what does that mean anyway?!?)

RESEARCH ARTICLES AND LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE

Topic: Why the F Do Americans Love Oaky Chardonnay So Much? 11:10

Ok, Carmela, today in this section we are going to talk about why American Chardonnay is so oaky, and why people love it so much, and if that is changing.

First, you can blame the reason American Chardonnay is so oaky at least in part on the French. Many of you have heard of the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris where the unthinkable happened - a Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa beat out famous Bordeaux reds in a blind tasting including the prestigious Château Mouton-Rothschild.

What you may not also know is that there were white wines there, and in that tasting, Chateau Montelena Chardonnay from California also won, beating out the big dogs of France.

As a result, Chardonnay, like Cabernet Sauvignon, entered into its "Bigger and Bolder" phase of the 1980s and 1990s. American winemakers, particularly in California, sought to maximize complexity and power, so they sought increases in residual sugar, more extensive malolactic fermentation for stronger buttery flavors, and greater use of oak aging for vanilla and toasty notes. This led to wines that were notoriously high in alcohol, often 15% or higher. This, Carmela, led to what you call Chardonnay often feeling like a meal in a glass. To me, this is the epitome of the wine becoming cocktail wine rather than a food wine.

As you can imagine, because this style of Chardonnay started to dominate, Americans in general came to expect their Chardonnays to be "big, ripe, fat, and oaky.” It was also pushed by California winemakers because this was the style best suited to the California climate. California's warm weather, particularly regions like Napa Valley and the Central Valley, produce grapes that are very ripe, have less acid, and have higher sugar levels. Adding a lot of oak aging and malolactic fermentation to these sugary, low-acid grapes makes the wine big and buttery.

And this wasn’t just for the high-end wines. In fact, the big, bold, oaky, buttery style helped winemakers who were making lower-end, mass produced wines because the oaking and sugar and malo fermentation could mask some of the faults that occur in the wine, and allow them to use lower-quality grapes because they could hide the taste behind all that butter. Always something I have suspected. Hide the crap behind a bunch of other flavors. But it’s still crappy wine.

So, you can blame the French for American Chardonnay getting so bad. Americans became accustomed to expect that this was the way wine and Chardonnay were supposed to taste, and so other winemakers in other areas like our very own Washington State started doing the same thing.

And you can’t blame them because Chardonnay has been one of the most popular wines in the United States and around the world. Did you know that by 1998 California Chardonnay plantings had surpassed France’s acreage, a whopping 42,000 acres, and that more than doubled by 2000 when there were over 100,000 acres of Chardonnay vines in California.

There were consequences to this approach, however. Critics have called out American Chardonnays as "simple, sweet, alcoholic and false," noting "too much oak, too little fruit and little care.” They described these wines as tasting like "stagnant water, pickling spices, or vanilla flavorings added to water," indicating that the oak and other winemaking influences overshadowed the fruit.

This led to the “Anything But Chardonnay" (ABC) Movement starting in the late 1990s as a direct response to these overly sweet, buttery, and oaky wines, suggesting that many consumers felt these characteristics were excessive and undesirable. This movement saw many drinkers actively shunning the varietal.

Today, there is more diversity in American Chardonnay. While you can still find plenty of people who want their buttery and oaky Chardonnays, and Chardonnay makers still often tout “buttery” on their labels, like one of the wines we are drinking today, there has been a moving shift away from overly ripe "butter bomb" Chardonnays towards more balanced styles with moderate or even no oak use.

Like we always say, once you have an unoaked Chardonnay or a Chablis, you are likely to be shocked at how fruity, balanced, and elegant it can be, rather than those punch-you-in-the-face Chardonnays from your local grocery stores. Although we are not drinking that type of Chardonnay today, we still say that you are missing out if you have not tried it.

But that’s enough information. I think it’s time to learn a little more about the specific wines we are drinking today so that we can get down to whether we can recommend any of the wines we chose today.

American Chardonnay Wines We Chose for This Episode 16:40

As usual, all of the wines we have chosen for this episode are under $25, actually a lot under $25, and all of them should be relatively easy to find because I bought them all at Costco! And, none of these wines should be hard to find at all in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I dare you to try and not find them. And I purposely chose wines that were inexpensive and easy to find.

The first wine we are going to drink is the 2022 Kirkland Signature Sonoma County Chardonnay which got a 90 rating from Wine Enthusiast and a 7.5 from the Reverse Wine Snob. It is hard to find out a lot about this wine, but there is some information to share. Most think that it is likely made by E&J Gallo as a white label wine, but the label on the bottle gives some clues. The wine is actually made by Grape and Grain Imports which is a division of Precept wines that we mentioned in the past - they are a big wine producer who makes wines for lots of stores, including Whole Foods, Target, and Trader Joe’s. They are responsible for blending, processing, and bottling this wine for Costco.

So, we don’t know the vineyards where the wine comes from or any specifics about how it is made other than it is from Sonoma County and they use French oak somewhere in the process. What else do you expect to get from an $8 bottle of wine? If you were pickier, you would look for something else.

The next wine we are going to drink is the 2022 Chateau Ste Michelle Indian Wells Chardonnay which received an 88 from Wine Enthusiast. We say this often - we might be biased because they are from the great state of Washington, but we tend to find Chateau Ste Michelle wines very drinkable. This wine is interesting because they say it comes from “Indian Wells” which would seem to indicate that it is a specific vineyard, but it is not. Indian Wells is the name for a collection of vineyards that Ste Michelle owns, and they are in the vast Columbia Valley AVA. If you look on a map, Columbia Valley is a huge area. So, my cynical side would say this is a marketing ploy to make you think that it is a single vineyard wine, but it is not.

The 2022 is actually not 100% Chardonnay - it actually contains 1% Muscat Canelli, which I would assume is being used because it is an aromatic white wine (Chardonnay is not) and can add some strong aromatics to the wine like citrus and apricot. So, we’ll see.

The winery said they had to harvest the grapes a little early, and that the fruit was sourced primarily from the Wahluke Slope AVA, which is a sub-appelation in the larger Columbia Valley AVA which is east of Yakima and north of the Tri-cities, for anyone who cares. The winery also says the grapes were lightly pressed and inoculated with yeast, that 98% (what did they do with the other 2%?) of the wine was sur lie aged for 7 to 9 months - this means they let it sit on the lees - the leftover yeast and other sediment which can add some depth and mouthfeel, and then it was aged in a combination of one year old French and American oak, neutral oak and stainless steel. So, not a lot of precision there, lots of stuff going on, but this is a mass-produced wine so it may be hard to be too precise.

The last wine we are going to drink is the JaM Cellars Butter Chardonnay which I could not find a vintage for, a sure sign of quality, he said sarcastically. It is a screw cap, so we’ll give it that. It also has a shit-ton of alcohol at 14.8%. I did find a tech sheet for the wine, but it wasn’t super helpful. They did have the audacity to say the appellation was “California” which despite being allowed technically as an AVA doesn’t seem like much of an indication of anything since there are 139 total in the state of California alone. Whatever. To me, that means it will not be a great wine.

The winery says that they cold ferment the wine and age it in their unique blend of oak. That’s it. No clarity on what kind of oak or how long or anything.

If you did not know, JaM cellars stands for John and Michelle Truchard who launched their label in 2008 to address the economic downturn which was impacting the country, especially the Napa Valley where they are located. They first made Butter Chardonnay in 2010, and it is now a huge wine, among the best selling wines in the US. So that is why we are drinking it. Best selling does not necessarily mean good.

Playing off of the name JaM, their tasting room is called JaM Cellars Wine & Music Studio and they have live music there, which is kind of fun, and they also are a major sponsor of the BottleRock Napa Valley music festival that our daughter has been to and major acts are there - including Justin Timberlake, Khruangbin, G. Love, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and Balthvs. But I digress.

That is enough information - let’s get to drinking! We’ll take a quick break and be right back. And, if you have these wines or similar wines, drink along with us to get some participation points, which you can trade-in for free stickers. You just need to send me an email with your mailing address, and I will get those “I drink with The Wine Pair Podcast” stickers over to you!

LINKS TO SOURCES FOR THESE SPECIFIC WINES

2022 Kirkland Signature Sonoma County Chardonnay, 2022 Chateau Ste Michelle Indian Wells Chardonnay, JaM Cellars Butter Chardonnay Wine Tasting, Pairing, and Review 23:50

Wine: Kirkland Signature Sonoma County Chardonnay
Region: California, Sonoma County
Year: 2022
Price: $7.99
Retailer: Costco
Alcohol: 13.5%
Grapes: Chardonnay
Professional Rating: WE 90, RWS 7.5 Vivino 3.5

What we tasted and smelled in this Kirkland Signature Sonoma County Chardonnay:

Color: Straw, pretty, lemony
On the nose: Gunpowder, oak, vanilla, pineapple juice, tropical fruit, candied orange peel, a bit of peach
In the mouth: Lemon curd, sweet, bigger bodied, peach upside cake, sweet bread or cake, gunpowder, not much butter, creamy

Food to pair with this Kirkland Signature Sonoma County Chardonnay: Chardonnay is hard to pair with food, can’t have anything too light, fish and chips, strong fish like cedar plank salmon, shrimp scampi, linguine and clams, white pizza, cheese board, garlic bread, spicy mac and cheese with lobster

As a reminder on our rating scale, we rate on a scale of 1-10, with no half points, where 7 and above means that we would buy it, and 4 and below means that we are likely to pour it down the sink, and a 5 or 6 means we are likely to drink it and finish it, but we are probably not going to buy it.

Kirkland Signature Sonoma County Chardonnay Wine Rating:

Joe: 5/10
Carmela: 7/10

Wine: Chateau Ste Michelle Indian Wells Chardonnay
Region: Washington, Columbia Valley
Year: 2022
Price: $10.89
Retailer: Costco
Alcohol: 14%
Grapes: 99% Chardonnay, 1% Muscat Canelli
Professional Rating: WE 88 Vivino 3.8

What we tasted and smelled in this Chateau Ste Michelle Indian Wells Chardonnay:

Color: Honey colored
On the nose: Orange creamsicle, fruity, white flowers, apple, pear, baking spices, apple pie filling
In the mouth: Spice, tangy citrus, orange, tannin, aluminum water bottle, round, apple, taste alcoholy, not super buttery

Food to pair with this Chateau Ste Michelle Indian Wells Chardonnay: Heavy cheese dishes, wrapped brie, cheese and nuts, feels almost like a dessert wine - would be good a spice cake, more of a sweet food or appetizer food rather than dinner

Chateau Ste Michelle Indian Wells Chardonnay Wine Rating:

Joe: 6/10
Carmela: 7/10

Wine: JaM Cellars Butter Chardonnay
Region: California
Year: NA
Price: $13.79
Retailer: Costco
Alcohol: 14.8%
Grapes: Chardonnay
Professional Rating: Vivino 3.8

What we tasted and smelled in this JaM Cellars Butter Chardonnay:

Color: Golden yellow
On the nose: Gunpowder, vanilla, oak, Fig Newton, fig jam on a cracker, apple cider spice, feels Fall, some sweetness, not a lot of fruit
In the mouth: Buttery, tart, thick - covers the tongue, very sweet, thick apple juice that you grow tired of, unctuous, not quenching, filmy in the mouth, end drops off, one note, making the gut burn, hot

Food to pair with this JaM Cellars Butter Chardonnay: Crackers, Takis spicy chips, salty or spicy foods, not a good food wine

JaM Cellars Butter Chardonnay Wine Rating:

Joe: 4/10
Carmela: 4/10

Which one of these are you finishing tonight?

Carmela: Chateau Ste Michelle Indian Wells Chardonnay
Joe: Chateau Ste Michelle Indian Wells Chardonnay

Taste profiles expected from Oaky American Chardonnay 42:32

General
- Oaked: aromas of peach, mango, lemon, vanilla and butter. Sometimes nuttiness or toasted bread.
- On the palate, full body, creamy mouthfeel, moderate acidity, and flavors of butter, vanilla, and baking spices, stone fruit, apple, citrus.
Kirkland Signature Sonoma County Chardonnay
- Winery: Kirkland Signature Sonoma County Chardonnay is filled with white peach and tropical fruit aromas. The mid-palate has a wonderful zest coming from the grape’s natural acidity which provides a long, layered, and creamy finish. Green apple, pear and ripe melon notes are complemented by vanilla from the French oak maturation.
- WE: This wine is juicy, concentrated yet surprisingly dry with tropical notes of pineapple, papaya, white nectarine drifting into fresh stone fruit, hints of florals, baking spice and finishing dry with lemon zest and vanilla crème brûlée. This is a Chardonnay lover's dream for everyday imbibing
- RWS: opens with a pleasing aroma of apples, citrus and a touch of toasty oak. There’s just a nice touch of butteriness on the nose. In the mouth, the wine is filled with sweet apple and citrus along with a little tart tropical fruit. The nice touch of butter from the nose also continues, but is overall pretty restrained. Thanks to a smooth, slightly creamy texture and good acidity this is quite easy to drink and a great representation of this style. It ends soft, round and long with lingering citrus and some nice buttery notes. While I don’t know that we can call this butterlicious anymore, it is delicious and a great value at this price.
Chateau Ste Michelle Indian Wells Chardonnay
- Winery: Specially selected and carefully aged, our Indian Wells Chardonnay balances tropical fruit and creamy butterscotch flavors with a hint of toasted oak.
- WE: The Indian Wells is a Chardonnay so creamy, its butter toffee flavor seems redundant. The wine's oak spice and pineapple aromas lead to that toffee flavor, as well as flavors of lemon sorbet and a sprig of mint. Fans of Chardonnays on the big and rich side need to track a bottle of this wine down
JaM Cellars Butter Chardonnay
- Winery: Butter brims with stone fruit and baked-lemon notes and has a lovely long vanilla finish
- Brix26degrees: A rich, buttery style of Chardonnay laced with aromas of baked lemons and mandarin oranges mingle with a hint of spice and smoke. The palate begins with crisp pineapple, bright citrus and ripe melon while a soft creaminess rounds out the finish

What is your verdict on American Chardonnay? 44:47
If you are a Chardonnay lover, we found a couple of good ones. We are not converts to oaky Chardonnay - sorry!

Outro and how to find The Wine Pair Podcast 45:33

Ok, so, Carmela, it’s time for us to go, but before we do, we want to thank you very much for listening to us - and if you haven’t done so yet, now would be the perfect time to follow or subscribe to our podcast and also a fantastic time to leave us a nice rating and review on our website or Apple podcasts or other podcast app - and it is an awesome and free way to support us and help us grow listeners.

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Alright, with that, we are going to sign off, so thanks again, and we will see you next time. And, as we say, life is short, so stop drinking shitty wine.

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Costco Kirkland Signature Challenge: Sonoma County Chardonnay!

Episode Transcript

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