A year or so ago, I was all set to become a paid-up, card-carrying member of the ABC Club. Anything But Chardonnay seemed to be a credo worth embracing to escape the great, golden lakes of the monotonous and ubiquitous stuff flooding every supermarket and off-licence, every press reception and far too many parties.
Well, poor old Chardonnay doesn't deserve to have been so roundly condemned. Yes, there is too much of it, with just about every wine region in the world having a shot at producing the most popular white wine ever. And yes, too much of it tastes awful - too oaky, too sweet, too dull, even too downright chemical. Yet there are more and more decent wines to demonstrate Chardonnay's strong points. They're often reasonably priced, as well. You could work your way through several appealing styles from several countries for the price of a premier cru or grand cru Burgundy.
Burgundy remains the benchmark, however. With their magical fusion of subtlety and power, the wines of the Cote d'Or are the most highly rated Chardonnays in the world.
Many wine snobs boast they only drink Burgundy, never Chardonnay - by which they mean they don't like Chardonnay in its most upfront, New World style, with great planks of oak threatening to leap from the bottle and whack the drinker in the face.
For this we have Australia to blame (or to thank: while half the wine world derides heavily oaked Chardonnay, the other half still laps it up). It was in 1976 - just five years after the first Australian Chardonnay was made - that Murray Tyrrell of Tyrrell's first experimented with new oak barrels.
"Nobody will drink white wine with wood in it," he was warned by a visitor from a rival winery. That must be the most foolish statement in drinking history, unless you count Sir Walter Raleigh's instruction to his son: "Delight not in wine; for there never was any man that came to honour or preferment that loved it."
By the early 1980s, Aussie Chardonnay had established a new style for the world to follow - golden sunshine in a glass, full of tropical fruits and toasty oak. That is still what most people think of when the word Chardonnay is mentioned. But by the end of the 1980s, fashion was shifting towards subtlety. Reading the signs, progressive wineries began to plant Chardonnay grapes in cooler areas to curb those over-luscious, ripe-fruit flavours, and to make their wines with less or even no recourse to oak.
At the Australia Day Tastings in London in January it was clear that unwooded Chardonnay is the Next Big Thing, about to flow in quantity into Irish wine shops.
In other countries, the Australian pattern has been repeated, with more cool-climate plantings and more careful handling of barrel fermentation and barrel ageing. The result? Chardonnays from Italy, Spain, Portugal and the south of France; from California, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, New Zealand - all so distinctive that it's often hard to believe they are all based on the same grape.
At one extreme, Chardonnay, presents green-apple crispness or lemony freshness, sometimes with underlying steeliness; at the other creamy, buttery fatness, with softer fruit flavours ranging from baked apples to peaches to pineapple. I don't believe any other grape can produce so many completely different tastes. That makes it less easy to tire of than Sauvignon Blanc - the world's second-favourite white varietal - with its much more narrowly defined, grass-asparagus-gooseberry nature.
The other thing I've come to realise is that Chardonnay is by far the most flexible white wine with food. You can have all the fun you like roasting a goose to god with your Riesling or rushing out to buy spinach and ricotta tortelloni for your Soave, but when dinner has to be composed in a hurry from whatever's in the fridge, it's as well to have a bottle of Chardonnay on hand to chill. It's good with all kinds of fish and poultry; with cheese, eggs and vegetables; with light risottos and pasta dishes - and it even goes creditably well with mild, creamy curries. The only thing you have to remember is to match food that has bigger, richer flavours with a wine in the more full-bodied style. It's as easy as . . . well, ABC.