Good white wine mostly makes itself. The job of the winemaker is to watch and prevent the natural processes from going awry due to bacteria or temperature imbalances and then only secondly to compensate for any seasonal weather variations which may affect the flavors negatively.

The steps for white wine handling are different from that of red wine. It is harder in the beginning. The reason it is more difficult to handle initially is because you have to little or no skin contact time. This skin contact time is known as maceration and it serves to bring color and flavor compounds from the skins into the must. It also breaks down the tougher fibrous materials balancing out the must and making the press easier.

White wine is pressed directly from the grapes into juice with little or no maceration and hence requires greater physical pressure to extract the juice but results in a simpler must without the complex compounds resulting from a long maceration period. This means all the variation in grape quality must be handled at press time. The main variables the winemaker must guard against with whites is oxidation, which causes the wine to dull and discolor, and polymerization where longer compounds spontaneously start forming from the shorter ones present in the wine resulting in off odors and hazes.

Secondary decisions that will affect the taste relate to; whether or not to oak the wine by barrel storage or other means, and whether or not to encourage a secondary form of fermentation called Malolactic fermentation.

Chardonnay in the Hudson Valley and other regions in New York is different in character from the California Chardonnay wine drinkers may be used to. Where California Chardonnays are usually best drunk young, Hudson Valley Chardonnays do not exhibit their character until at least a year after fermentation. At that time a fruity nose and kind of flinty minerally quality may emerge which clearly marks it as a New York wine.

Some people prefer the open, buttery California style Chardonnays to the more compact, flinty complex taste of New York Chardonnays or vice versa. That's what makes horse races.