Chardonnay is one of the widely spread white grape variety in the world and is especially important in Burgundy and Champagne French vineyards. Chardonnay wines present a large sensorial variability but also some common features. The objective of this work was to identify the key odorants that account for the typicality of Chardonnay wines. Two complementary approaches were carried out. The first one was aimed to assess the typicality of the samples, and the second one was an olfactometry approach aimed to identify the key odorants. First, a panel of French wine experts (n=28) assessed the typicality offorty-eight French white wines (29 from the Chardonnay variety and 19 from other white varieties: Aligoté, Chenin, Marsanne, Melon de Bourgogne, Pinot blanc, Sauvignon and Sylvaner) according to their Chardonnay concept. As expected, wines from the Chardonnay varicty were judged as globally more typical than the wines from other varieties, although a large overlap was observed. A subset of eighteen wines was selected for further analysis. The selected wines were either highly or lowly typical and for both typicality levels, some were from Chardonnay grapes and some from other varieties. Secondly, the 18 wines were analysed by Gas Chromatography-Olfactometry (GC-0) according to the detection frequency method (Pollien et al. 1997) by a trained panel (n=l 7). Seventy-two odorant areas (OA) were found. Partial Least Square regression between typicality scores and the detection frequency of each OA showed that 10 of the OA were potentially responsible of a high level of typicality. The identification of the corresponding compounds is currently undertaken.