This is the second installment in my occasional series, “The Chardonnay Chronicles.”

Last we left chardonnay, we were in the far north of its ancestral home, Burgundy, in Chablis. Today we engage a comparison with Burgundy’s opposite end, the southernmost subregion of Mâcon, 130 or so miles away, for a dramatically different expression of this noble grape.

In between these two poles, in the Côte d’Or, lie some of the world’s most lauded, loved, and studied vineyards. Meursault and the Montrachets are the most famous areas for Burgundian white wines, with prices to match (or exceed). Deep golden, intensely perfumed and resonantly flavored, requiring 7 to 10 years of aging in bottle, these wines are formidable evidence for the claim that chardonnay makes the grandest white wines on Earth.

A mere mortal, though, I prefer to dwell in the Mâcon. Little of the Côte d’Or’s mystical splendor is evident there, but some of the succulence, the calm, the giving quality of unwound chardonnay are on full display. And the prices are manageable.

As I wrote in the first installment of the Chardonnay Chronicles (Aug. 12; go to bit.ly/1KibhUF), Chablis is where a relationship with chardonnay should begin. Nowhere is chardonnay rendered more pristinely, clearly into wine; nowhere are the elements brought into more legible focus.

Chablis will always carry a unique thrill, but much of the Mâcon’s charm comes from being what Chablis is not. Chablis travels along a vertical axis, straight and soaring. The action drives purposefully, and even when the wines are complex and brimming, they’re spring-loaded and don’t much veer.

Mâcon wines take over the horizontal; they flood the zone. They are broad, with more conspicuous textural heterogeneity, likelier to accept tangents as part of the journey. The fruit, whether citric, stone-pitted or tropical, is decidedly sweeter – though the clay-topped limestone soils in which most Mâcon vineyards grow provide a chalky, mineral crunch and drying counterpoint.

The first hint for me that I’m drinking a wine from the Mâcon is a distinct tanginess, as from slightly underripe pineapple and mango. Sometimes pale honey, sometimes orange blossom. Compared with Chablis, Mâcon is more obvious, more roughly textured and less fine. More oomph, less filigree. More flesh, less brain. Where Chablis demands attention and draws you in, Mâcon goes in the opposite direction, giving so much from the first bell that the wines almost pay attention to you.

Having said all that, I should admit that to speak of the Mâcon as a unity is unfair, since the area is large: More than 17,000 acres are covered in vines. That’s a lot in Burgundy, where so much of what accounts for the distinction between denominations – and the delight and worth – is the geological diversity from one meter to the next.

The Mâcon encompasses such relatively well known appellations as Pouilly-Fuissé and Saint-Véran, the lesser known but tremendously intriguing Viré-Clessé, and several more obscure village-based denominations. Beyond these are the general “Mâcon” wines, which are permitted to use grapes from throughout the area but often are the beneficiaries of exceptional denomination fruit.

The wines do excellent service as a bridge, in both directions, linking chardonnay’s neutral, terroir-transmitting palette with its richer, more enveloping manifestations. A purist weaned on Chablis or stainless-steel-fermented-and-aged Californian chardonnay might find in a good Mâcon a way to appreciate the structural enhancement yielded by judicious but noticeable oak. Heading in the opposite direction, a lover of sumptuous oaky chardonnay might take pleasure in that same good Mâcon’s combination of plenitude and bell-rung acidity.

The following are the wines that are most vivid for me right now, but many other fine examples exist. Additionally, the overall category of Bourgogne AC usually contains a majority of Mâcon fruit; with some exceptions, the prices are lower, the grapes from less choice sites, the vinification larger-scale and less attentive. These may lack the distinctiveness and length of select Mâcon-designated whites such as the ones listed below, but they are an easy and charming introduction nonetheless.

Domaine Chêne Mâcon-La Roche Vineuse 2014, $17. Sunbaked and luscious, mouthfilling, with tremendous acidity and length. Rare for wines at this price, this wine is “lieu-dit,” a phrase signifying that all the fruit comes from a single small piece of land, in this case Château Chardon. That’s not necessarily a quality signifier, just an indication that unlike a wine that may use fruit from a wider area, the wine potentially communicates place more than grape. In this case that’s true; the Domaine Chêne is singular. The 2013 was excellent; this newer vintage is even better, and has the body and structure (endowed by a small amount of used-oak in the cellar, though no malolactic fermentation) to age well for several years.

Jean-Claude Thevenet Mâcon Pierreclos 2013, $20. An elegant standard-bearer for central Mâcon, this is somewhat more precise and honed than the Domaine Chêne. Forty-plus-year-old vines from four vineyards are responsible for the profound mineral orientation of the wine; vinification without oak leaves the fruit clean and crisply succulent; contact with the fine lees (some of the dead yeast cells) during fermentation rounds out and lengthens the body.

Christophe Cordier Bourgogne Blanc Vieilles Vignes 2013, $24. It doesn’t say “Mâcon” on the label, but Cordier’s Domaine is there, and the fruit sourced for this wine emerges from several Mâconnais vineyards, including quite a bit of Pouilly-Fuissé, with average vine age of more than 60 years. This is a racy, luxurious wine, with some tropical fruit notes lifted by piercing acidity. A combination of trusted vineyard sources and extremely light-touch vinification (grapes slowly pressed whole-cluster, fermented with indigenous yeast, gravity-fed bottling, etc.) brings us a wine in the mid-$20 price range that tastes like it should cost $10 more.

The Cordier is a wine for classic rich Burgundian food pairings: scallops in cream sauce, lobster, soft cheeses. Many Mâcon wines can perform such duty ably, but the wonderful thing about them is that they don’t require such intensity of cuisine. A little toasted dark bread with smoked trout and mustard is all it takes to bring out the complexity in these wines. Or a handful of salted nuts. A white pizza covered in caramelized onions is an easy and delicious salty-sweet companion. Fish tacos are a total winner, the corn from the tortillas mating perfectly with the wines’ warm, buttery tones.

Pay attention to those tones as we prepare for the next installment in these Chardonnay Chronicles, when the focus will fix more emphatically on wines that use oak to complete their statements.

Joe Appel is the Wine Buyer at Rosemont Market. He can be reached at:

soulofwine.appel@gmail.com