Budget Wine Review: Naked Grape Chardonnay

Producer: The Naked Grape
Type: Chardonnay
Average Retail Price: $7 USD
Taste (1 = lowest 10=highest): 7
Snobby Wine Words: A hint of lemon butter, with the slightest whisper of an oak finish.

Drink When: You’ve got some really good cheese on hand and you want to feel all fancy and whatever. Scratch off the price tag and serve this when you want to impress guests – the label is just too pretty to hide. “Oh yes,” you’ll brag, “this Chardonnay is from California.”

Notes:
The label says, “aromas of pineapple and peach,” but I beg to differ. It’s a Chardonnay – or “Chardy,” as I like to call it – so it’s definitely got a fruity kick to it, but pineapple? Peach? I didn’t get those from my tasting. Instead it tastes like a fancy lemon butter you might get at a fancy French restaurant, the kind you never go to anymore because your daughter doesn’t eat anything that doesn’t involve ketchup, and your son likes to get out of his chair and talk to the other diners, and then your husband gets frustrated with them, and you end up getting everyone’s meals “to-go” anyway and eat your fancy French food at home, cold, after the kids have gone to bed. It tastes like the butter you get at those kinds of restaurants.

The tartness of the lemon flavor is just enough to keep the sweet, creamy Chardonnayness of this particular Chardy from tasting like a bottle full of melted butter. Not that there’s anything wrong with drinking melted butter, but it won’t give you half the buzz you’ll get from drinking wine.

If you have some good cheese on hand – and I don’t mean Kraft Singles – now is the time to bust it out. I tried this wine with some schmancy hand-cut Jarlsberg (heh, “cut the cheese”) and found that the cheese sets off a nice high note in the wine. That is to say, the cheese compliments the wine, and vice versa. Chardonnay, for all its famous versatility, is really made to go with cheese. The Chardonnay grape, after all, is French in origin, and the French are nothing if not cheesey. Do props by your Chardy and invest in a wedge of good, hard cheese (heh, “hard”) to go with it. Then light a candle, put on some Neil Diamond, and lady, you’ve got yourself a party for one.