Issue IV: Fat Bastard Chardonnay Edition

 Thierry & Guy Fat Bastard Chardonnay

We don’t generally drink a lot of whites, as a rule, but my wife likes to have a bottle on hand for cooking. Despite some advice I’ve seen elsewhere, I don’t think you can just use any old thing and I firmly believe that if you wouldn’t drink it, you shouldn’t be cooking with it, either. I’ve seen the exact opposite advice elsewhere, but in my view, you run a high danger of ruining your food with a garbage wine. Whites can be very dry and very astringent, two characteristics I may find more appealing if I want to make vinegar (I don’t), but are nearly useless to me in terms of drinking.  Both this and the other regular white I keep in rotation (also a Chardonnay – review coming soon) are something I don’t mind drinking, though we wouldn’t use for movies. While the two share that characteristic, both are very different wines, though they both are French as well, perhaps not coincidentally, though this particular one has a more British sounding name.

Chardonnays, generally as one of the stronger and drier whites, can get very harsh, very quickly, but this one has a very nice and appealing smoothness to it. It’s not quite what I would call refreshing, but it has just the right balance of fruitiness and dryness to it, along with a pretty good flavor, though if you bolt it, you will get the alcohol hit.

I look for a couple things in choosing a white for cooking. I’ve already described one of them above, which is the same sort of criteria I use for choosing a drinking wine. The other – and this might sound a bit silly – is that the bottle must come with a screwcap. This is for mostly purely practical reasons, i.e. we like to keep the bottle in the door and it generally won’t fit with a stopper and it is currently much more difficult for our son to open the screwcap than to remove a stopper. That is not to say that we’ve not had other Chardonnays (others are on my list as well), but after finding these two that work well for cooking (I’d give a slight nod to the other one), I’ve pretty much stopped the search and don’t generally look to those.

What we have here is one that I may or may not pick up if it is on SPA, but if it is, I usually will.  The whites we keep for cooking are generally exempt from the three main categories, so expect not to see too many more of these as we go along the way.