I thought it was going to be like shooting fish in a barrel.

In a blind tasting, we stacked up some Old World wines against a few domestic ones to see if we could tell which was which.

My thought was this: Old World wines tend to be more lean, as grapes are picked earlier for acidity and structure, making more food-friendly wines. New World wines rely more on new oak, resulting in ripe, full-flavored, lush wines.

That's quite a generalization, if not oversimplification. But as with all such clich?s, it so often happens to be true.

To test this assumption, I started by pitting two chardonnays, one from Chablis, one from Oregon. Let's see how they fare.

I had had the Lionel Bussy, 2005 Chablis, $25, at the fine Fenouil restaurant previously, and thought it quintessentially Chablisian. read more