Corrupt Review: JL Wood
People Who Don't Like Whites Like These Whites. I Hope It's Okay to Say That.
I’m sure this surprises you about a guy with a wine column, but there are many things about my marriage that are gender-reversed. My lovely wife Cassandra fixes stuff around the house, kills mice, won’t watch musicals with me, and enjoys detailed discussions about bathroom-related activities that I prefer to refer to only as “bathroom related activities.”
It’s also hard to get her to drink white wine1. I cook a lot of fish (more than she would like) and she’s always pushing to pair it with a light red. And I cave, because it is a small price to pay for having to kill mice.
The white that is the hardest for me to get her to drink is chardonnay. I can sometimes fool her with a Pouilly-Fuissé or Chablis, but I often get caught.
So when JL Wood sent me four wines, each with the word “chardonnay” in the biggest font on the label, I knew I had some selling to do.
JL Wood only makes chardonnay. And you can only buy it online. They’ve only been bottling it since 2020 and don’t make all that much. Mostly, they sell their grapes to other wineries, as they have been since 1988. I did not tell any of this to Cassandra. I focused on the “free bottles” part.
They sent a No Oak Chardonnay ($28), a Premier Chardonnay ($34), a Classic Chardonnay ($49), and a JL Chardonnay ($18.50).2
I liked them all, and my weak palate didn’t notice a huge difference in the amount of oak. They all were clean, with a lot of acid to balance the sweet fruit.
But Cassandra really liked them. Like she asked to drink them. We hadn’t drunk this much white wine in a long time. And she could tell the difference, slightly preferring the Premier.
I told Ed about the conversion he had performed on Cassandra. He was nonplussed. Unless nonplussed means the opposite of what I think it does. He was unsurprised. Maybe plussed.
“I have people say this quite often. It seems to satisfy people who are routinely red wine drinkers,” he said. He thought it might be the lack of oak he uses, but Cassandra likes plenty of heavily oaked reds. And, unlike me, whiskey.3
He thought that while she liked vanilla tones with those stronger flavors, it might be too much for her in a white, the way she says I use too much rosemary and thyme when I cook. “With a white wine things tend to show more. If you go too far astray from the fruit you muddle things up,” he said. Also, he said, she probably likes the big, ripe Monterey grapes.
When I poured a JL Wood Classic chardonnay against this Burgundy last night at a dinner party with chicken thighs and corn risotto…
… Cassandra preferred the JL Wood. It was brighter, funner. Less austere. But still clean. Things I used to be.
JL Wood grows their grapes in Monterey and blends them up near Napa, because that’s where winemaker El Filice’s grandkids are. He only makes chardonnay because it grows so well in hot Monterey, and because he thinks other people are still over-oaking their chardonnay, and because he thinks there’s a glut of cabernet sauvignon in California. Also, he seems to like chardonnay.
Ed’s been making wine for 42 years, but he isn’t grizzled. He’s more interested in telling me that adding sugar to the pressed grapes to give the yeast something to turn into alcohol - which he does not do thanks to his very ripe, sweet grapes - is called Chaptalization, after Jean-Antoine-Claude Chaptal, a chemist who was Napoleon’s Minister of Interior when Napoleon was struggling with some sour-ass grapes.
The wines are more impressive than implied by the labels with animals on them, even if they’re stone-cut drawings and foxes and wild boars actually roam the vineyards. I would have put a picture of tough Monterey ranchers or the vineyard, or maybe even Ed.
I don’t really care why Cassandra likes these chardonnays. I just know that I get to drink white wine with fish and vegetable dishes. And, if Ed keeps this up, maybe I’ll even get to eat less red meat.
American women drink white wine 64 percent of the time. Men drink it 36 percent of the time. This is why the birthrate is plummeting.
The website has some deals that bring these bottles closer to $10.
See paragraph one.