“It was a new-style chardonnay with very little butter and the oak flavours subtle. It was a pleasant drink.” Wine columnist RICHARD CALVER gets a taste for a chardonnay from Orange.

Alanis Morissette’s song Ironic was released in 1996 as a single from the 1995 album Jagged Little Pill.

I was living in Melbourne then and found myself yelling at the radio: “Rain on your wedding day isn’t bloomin’ irony, just bad luck!”

Irony involves a contrast between expectation and reality in a way that has some kind of twist or reversal. 

It is this concept that Duncan Cook, of Cooks’ Lot Wines in Orange has put on display in marketing his Anything But F!!!!ng Chardonnay chardonnay. 

At the tasting he presented recently at the Strange Alchemy bottle shop on the Kingston Foreshore, I sampled four of his wines.

It was his 2023 barrel-aged chardonnay that evoked a lively debate about this varietal.

Duncan told me that he made this wine in a “consumer friendly” way after I’d remarked that it had citrus characteristics, noticeably lime on the nose and grapefruit on the palate and had stepped away from the “big” chardonnays of the past.

It was a new-style chardonnay with very little butter and the oak flavours subtle. It was a pleasant drink. 

But, I said to Duncan: “I love a good balance of butter and oak, one of the more traditional chardonnays, but the sort of wine that has led to some people I know saying, ‘I’ll drink any white except chardonnay’ because they have ignored how, with good balance, the butter and oak wrap themselves around some stronger food flavours.” 

Duncan understood and said: “Chardonnay is the number one white grape variety planted in this country. I know exactly what you mean and I’ve made a wine that you describe.”

He disappeared outside to his van and came back a short while later, gifting me a bottle of the Anything But F!!!!ng Chardonnay 2023 from fruit purchased from Orange growers.

It certainly is a bold wine with oak and butter as well as a lemony flavour balanced with a crisp acidity on the finish. Excellent wine, it is priced at $35 on the Cooks’ Lot website. 

Chardonnay is best produced in colder climes such as Orange with its elevated landscape dominated by Mount Canobolas, 1395 metres above sea level.

An article produced by one of the Halliday authors/tasters in 2024 laments that too much of Australia’s extensive planting of this varietal has occurred in regions not entirely suited to producing premium quality fruit.

“It is not a warm or hot climate variety so having it inland, in irrigated regions the likes of the Murray Darling, the Riverland and the Riverina does no one any favours. 

“Tellingly, 75 per cent of Australia’s entire crush fell to the 20 largest wineries. Much of the chardonnay produced in these regions is cheap, rarely cheerful, usually one-dimensional – and often sweet.”

Thank goodness we have wine makers such as Duncan Cook from the cooler areas of Australia who know how to make a good chardonnay. 

And to “finish” an ironic statement about an ageing wine critic: “The critic praised the wine’s ‘long finish’ but never saw his own coming.”