The Great Chardonnay Tasting

We have been planning this Chardonnay tasting for a year now, well, since Fall of 2021 and finally, the day of the event arrived this past Saturday. This Chardonnay tasting was going to be a blind tasting, but not so blind that we did not know what the wines were. The lineup included three wines from the Old World and three wines from the New World, provided by the people who attended the tasting. Initially the wines were disguised in bags so that we did not know what we were tasting. If the closure on the bottle could be considered a clue, the contents were decanted into a clean Burgundy bottle so that the top could not give away the identity of the wine. Tasting notes were provided ahead of time so that people could try to use those notes as well as their taste buds to discern which wine was which.
The Chardonnay lineup included the following wines: 2002 Meursault 1er Cru "La Piece sous le bois" Domaine Robert Ampeau, 2017 VGW Chardonnay 00 Winery, 2017 "Charles Heintz Vineyard" Littorai Winery, 2013 Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Combettes" Domaine Leflaive, 2017 Chablis 1er Cru "Mont de Milieu" Domaine Samuel Billaud, and 2020 "Mate's Vineyard" Kumeu River.

The participants decided to pair the wines with small bites of food that would come out throughout the wine tasting. Here is the menu written into our Jacques Pepin Menus book by one of our guests, Noah, who is a proficient calligrapher:

I could not imagine a better first entry to document our gustatory adventures. In the next blogposts, I will give more details about each of the wines that we tasted. Stay tuned!