This past week we had a quiet meal with some nice lemon/pepper/herb roasted chicken.  We matched the chicken with white rice and a quick mushroom/onion/zucchini sauté’.  The chicken was dynamite, but the sauté’ was a bit weird to me.  My wife liked it, so that is enough for me 🙂  The dinner was nice and I had a simple yet nice Chardonnay to pair with it.  I must say about this particular wine, that it is one of the few wine labels that do not over speak the qualities of their wine, and one that is actually quite accurate.  I always love looking at wine labels to see what the marketing department of these wineries, or some marketing consultants, can come up with.  That said the Barkan Chardonnay 2007 is a simple and nice quaffer, whose label correctly depicts the wine.

The wine notes follow below:

Barkan Chardonnay 2007 – Score: B
One of the most pleasant things about this wine other than its nose is its label.  The label on this wine actually depicts the bottle that it wraps, which is different from other bottles, where you drink the wine and read its label, and wonder if you have been dropped into an episode of the Twilight Zone.  The nose on this straw colored wine is filled with guava, lemon, pear and a quick whiff of blueberries.  The mouth on this medium bodied wine starts off with fruit of lemon, pear, apricot and fresh apples.  The mid palate is just acid and the finish is long with more acidity.  The wine lacks balance – which can occur when a wine like this does not have enough fruit to counteract the massive amount of acidity that it has.  Some wineries would oak this wine, which would fill out this wine and maybe balance out the acidity, but that would add cost, space, and time which this wine would not really be worth.  The acidity of this wine gets so clawing after a bit of air, that it crosses that line between spice and acidity.  There is no spice in this wine, but man, it can throw off enough mouth puckering characteristics to make me think twice.