CheapWineFinder Podcast
Talking about remarkable wines that pair nicely with your wallet! Because we like to keep it cheap but excellent.
CheapWineFinder Podcast
French Elegance on a Budget: The 2024 Bouchard Chardonnay Review
Dive into the wonderful world of affordable French wine with our latest discovery: the Bouchard Aîné & Fils Chardonnay 2024, a remarkable $9.99 Costco find that proves exceptional quality doesn't require a hefty price tag.
When I first spotted this bottle, I thought I'd stumbled upon an impossibly cheap Burgundian wine. While it's technically categorized as "wine of France" (their entry-level classification), this Chardonnay comes from Bouchard, a winery established in the early 1800s and now part of the prestigious Boisset Collection led by Jean-Charles Boisset – recently named Wine Enthusiast's Man of the Year. Talk about pedigree!
What makes this wine special? The careful sourcing from southern and western French vineyards, with select higher-quality Burgundian Chardonnay blended in for complexity. The winemaking shows impressive attention to detail – four separate vineyard plots fermented individually, with one portion aged four months in oak and the remainder in stainless steel on lees. The result? A bright, juicy Chardonnay with delicate creaminess, tropical fruit notes, and balanced acidity that allows the flavors to unfold beautifully. Unlike California Chardonnays, you won't find pronounced butter notes here – just clean, refreshing, French elegance.
The 2024 vintage's freshness is a significant advantage. Having been harvested last fall and quickly brought to market, this wine exemplifies why certain styles benefit from youth rather than age. Perfect for summer sipping, it pairs wonderfully with light fare like salads or seafood tacos, though it truly shines as a standalone pleasure. At just $9.99 at Costco ($12 elsewhere), this bottle demonstrates why exploring value wines can be so rewarding. Try it yourself and discover how "keeping it cheap" can still mean drinking very, very well!
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Hello, it's Domain Dave. Again CheapWineFindercom, another podcast. We write up three value-priced wines a week on the CheapWineFindercom website and after each one we plug in the microphone and there we go. And that's where we're at the moment. And we've got a wine I picked up at Costco for $9.99. I initially thought it was a $10 Burgundian wine, which is really cheap. They don't usually go that cheap. And this is the Bouchard Annie and Phil's. I think that's in Suns, chardonnay 2024. I think that's in Sons, chardonnay 2024.
Speaker 1:Bouchard E is a winery that's been around since the early 1800s in Burgundy. They're a big deal in France. They are now part of the Boisset Collection, which is run by Jean-Charles Boisset, jcb, as he is known, and he just recently won Wine Enthusiasm man of the Year Award. So this is a very good vineyard from a very distinguished wine company. And so there you go. This is their everyday wine. This is not AOC, this is a wine of France, which is their lowest denominator. But it used to be table wine at one point, and now they can make it kind of like California does, where California can have California in a label, or it can be Sonoma one point, and now they can make it kind of like the friend, like california does, where california can have california in a label, or, you know, it can be sonoma, it could be lodi, or if you put those two together it's california. So this is. They can now make wine, kind of like the california winemakers do. I'm gonna take a sip of this one. This is made to be drink it. Now. This is a, a wine, that is, it's a 2024, which we'll get in that just a second, and it's made to drink it this summer.
Speaker 1:The vineyards were from the south and the west of France, which is interesting because the cheap. The Languedoc is where a lot of the value price wines come from, and that's on the east, and so they said they came from the south and the west, and I'm not quite sure what that is, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of wine in France, there's a lot of vineyards in France. And they also said that they added some Burgundian Chardonnay, some higher-priced ones, just for sweetener to add it to, which that does work when you have value-priced wine, to give it a little bit of something that's a little bit above this price range in there. It does do something to the wine. They fermented the different plots separately. I think there are four different plots. One of the plots of wine was aged for four months in oak On oak they always say on oak.
Speaker 1:I never know what that means. The other three in stainless steel on lees. Anlis is the dead yeast. If you stir it it makes the wine just a touch creamy. I'm going to take another sip of this wine, and this wine is bright and shiny and new and tasty. I'm going to take another sip. So they um, so they harv this wine. Harvest this wine. Maybe last september, october went through the fermentation process four months from there we're talking about Maybe it's done in February, and then there's get it over to the United States and it's just almost June.
Speaker 1:This thing's brand new, which is what you want. If you go somewhere and you see the 2023 and the 2024 is available, grab the 2024. Sometimes you want a wine to have a little age. This is one of those times. You don't. You want it to be bright and juicy and alive, and this thing is.
Speaker 1:It's got a really nice nose. It's got very good taste. There's a little bit of that oak in there. You don't get butter on French Chardonnay like you do in California. They don't do that. So this is just really nice flavors I'm getting. I got a little bit of cream, which could be from stirring the leaves, if they did do that, or it could just be one of the flavors. I'm also been getting coconut milk from these things too, because you get tropical fruit and sometimes you get just a touch of creaminess that lends itself. So I'm take another sip. You know, like I always say, I don't give numbers, I don't give grades, but I do take sips. This was $9.99 at Costco and it's from what I can tell just looking at the internet wine shops. It's about $12 everywhere else. So you know, so Costco's got a nice price, but it's not crazy.
Speaker 1:And this isn't a wine trying to be super fancy and not being super fancy. This is just a solid, everyday Chardonnay that tastes good, has good acidity, it's well-made, you know. It's got some length to it. The acidity allows the flavors to unfold. It just does a nice job and it tastes good. I mean, if you just want a summer sipper and I don't know if this is eh, you could have a salad, and this would be fine. Or maybe cold shrimp, that'd be great too. And, oh you know, tacos maybe, as long as they're not too spicy or anything. Maybe chicken tacos or maybe seafood tacos, but basically this is a sipping wine.
Speaker 1:This is made just to sit around, put a chill on it and just have a good time and sip it. It's going to go down really easy. You're going to want to share it with your friends. Ten bucks a French Chardonnay from a really good winery and a good wine company JCB. You see their wines all over the place. I'm going to take my last sip and we'll close this up. Yep, so there you go. It's the Bouchard and Eve and Phil Chardonnay 2024. It tastes really good. It's well worth 10 bucks. It's a bargain. And uh, that's it for me. Domain Dave, keep it cheap. We'll come back with some more wines in a couple days, in June, but so far the summer wines have been doing really well. So, adios, keep it cheap and I'll be talking to you Bye-bye.