A Vintage Victim

Mark West
Chardonnay
13.8% alcohol
$12.00
2005

Cocktail party style wine tastings are always a little difficult. There are so many things to take your mind off of the task at hand. In the case of the event at the Atlantic Tasting Room in Sandy Springs, Georgia, it was the smell of some amazing food, a vast selection of carefully chosen retail wines and meeting and greeting the other members of the Atlanta Wine Club (click here for more information). So taking all of that into consideration here is my impression of the first wine, Mark West Chardonnay. (the second wine is reviewed below) It was a reasonably dry wine with a nice acidic edge to it that gave the wine some character and worked well with the hors d'oeuvres. I read some reviews of this wine online and several reviewers referred to the delicious vanilla overtones. In the ViniCode this would be registered in the oak column. But I was hard pressed to find this oakiness. And in a California Chardonay I was ready to taste it. The fruit and earth was a little tight, present but muted. The earthiness was a green, grassy quality, that might be due to a less than stellar growing season. The alcohol content of this wine was quite high at 13.8%. Granted it did give the wine some body, but it also made the wine have a slightly bitter aftertaste. I guess the thing that bugged me about this wine was that it was not clean, not defined. It was fine, but nothing I would search out again. To be honest, it reminded me of an anemic Sauvignon Blanc. Having said this, other vintages of Mark West Chardonnay have fared quite well in Wine Spectator ratings. 2005 was a mediocre year in Santa Barbara (click here for chart), so let's say they made the best of a middling situation. However, I would not buy this wine again. And the back label painted a real pretty picture but mentioned nothing about the wine inside the bottle. And that drives me crazy!!!