It’s cool to drink chardonnay once again – and this time it’s because it actually tastes good, writes Ewan Sargent.

Winemaker Chris Scott still gets asked if he’s going to make one of those big oaky chardonnays that once filled New Zealand’s wine cellars. ‘‘There are people who love those old-school chardonnays, and if someone came out tomorrow with a big, buttery, deep-yellow chardonnay that was like licking a table leg, then they would find a ready audience,’’ he says with a laugh.

But it’s unlikely to be him making such a wine. Those chardonnays were a low point in our wine-making history, and missing them is likely to be more about the power of nostalgia than remembering a great wine taste.

Scott – who is with Church Road in Hawke’s Bay – thinks most chardonnay drinkers have moved on.

And the wines definitely have.

Once we thought those chardonnays were posh and cutting edge, just like 1980s big hair and shoulder pads.

While the rest of the world was calling rich, urban liberals who were all talk but no action ‘‘Champagne socialists’’, we called them ‘‘chardonnay socialists’’. (The joke was on us because our chardonnays weren’t that posh.)

New World Wine Awards chief judge Jim Harre recalls the oaky, buttery monsters with some sympathy.

‘‘You couldn’t taste much fruit, but you had these wonderful sensations of mouthfeel, and the seductive vanilla oak characters that came through, and a little bit of peach in the background.

‘‘Some people just loved that. Other people just hated the concept of the oak,’’ Harre says.

Scott recalls it a little more technically. ‘‘There was lots of oak, sweet American oak, which gave the wines coconut and vanilla flavours.’’

Unfortunately winemakers worked under the flawed theory that if a little oak was good then a lot more must be even better.

Winemakers also wrung as much flavour as they could out of the grapes following the new world wines theme of big fruit flavours. It made the wines big but also crass. There were secondary malolactic fermentations to create butteriness but that also lowered acidity.

‘‘It just left them very, very strongly buttery and that butter would turn to rancid butter with age,’’ he says.

But Scott points out there was actually a good reason for their popularity.

‘‘It was very easy to be impressed by those chardonnays because we had all grown up with muller-thurgau, something light and fruity, and slightly sweet. Then, all of a sudden someone gave you this dry white wine full of really interesting texture and flavour. It was different, it was new and it was tasty. It was probably quite easy to like.’’ For a while.

A double hit for chardonnay was when after everyone started to tire of the big, oaky chardonnays, winemakers swung the pendulum too far in the other direction.

They started cranking out unoaked chardonnays, often trying to make them like sauvignon

In relative peace and quiet, making chardonnay has continued to evolve. Everything has been dialled back and become more nuanced.