A white pizza wine

While flipping through the Sunday supplements last weekend, one of your Wine Nuts came across an ad for the newest wine marketing ploy by Cost Plus World Market. Seemingly interested in joining the Trader’s Joe bandwagon of store-specific wine offerings, World Market is now touting three varietals creatively named as fun twists on said varietals. Being dedicated wine tasters – and suckers for a good marketing scheme – we dutifully purchased the three offerings and will review them as we sample them. Tonight our dinner suggested a nice Chardonnay was in order so we opened up our newly acquired bottle of 2006 Chard-on-yeah!. Here’s what we found.

In short, this wine is a great example of a white pizza wine. By that we mean an affordable, drinkable, unassuming, inexpensive wine to enjoy everyday. No special occasion needed. Typically, since pizza has tomato sauce, our favorite pizza wines are red wines. Tonight we found the white equivalent.

The label defines Chard-on-yeah! as “…an expression of joy upon discovering the pleasures of unoaked Chardonnay!” Since your Two Wine Nuts are not big fans of traditionally oaked, buttery California Chardonnays, we were hopeful that we’d find lots of crisp fruitiness in this unoaked version. And upon sniffing, that’s exactly what we found. But upon tasting, we were left sort of wanting more. While it definitely lacked the heavy butter and oak we tend to steer away from, this 2006 Chardonnay from Monterey County was largely flat and limp. It had some hints of fruit but mostly this wine was unobtrusive and inoffensive. It showed a bit more interest when paired with our pesto chicken, but mostly it was just a casual easy wine that didn’t get in the way nor distract from the conversation or the meal.

Would we buy it again? Probably. At $9.99, it’s a good wine to keep on hand for casual meals that call for a white wine. But we’re unlikely to bring it out when we have company or when we want a good example of a nice, fruity, complex, unoaked Chardonnay. Certainly worth a try but keep your expectations in check.