Happy Valentine’s Day! To celebrate this week of love I’m featuring “Perfect Partners in Wine Crime.” Looking at my wine collection, it occurred to me that many California winemakers — especially those in Northern California — who produce Pinot Noir also specialize in Chardonnay. These two grapes couldn’t be more different — from their biological make up to how vintners go about turning them into wine. (Learn more about Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.) Yet, they keep coming to my door in pairs — one white, one red; one Chard, one Pinot. So this week’s experiment celebrates that, maybe even in wine, opposites do attract. Each of the producers below “specializes,” if you will, in Chardonnay and Pinot Noir (the exception being my New Zealand case study), so I tasted them each together within the span of an evening to see if and how these wines complemented each other.
