Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [16]
Here are the different ways wineries control the amount of oakiness in a wine:
Barrel Fermentation vs. Barrel Aging The winemaker can choose just one or the other for a subtler oak effect, or do both to give a stronger oak character to the wine.
Time in a Barrel The amount of time a wine spends in the barrel matters: The longer it spends in barrels, the oakier it will taste. Obviously, if a wine is both fermented and aged in barrels it will naturally lengthen the total time the wine spends in oak.
Age of the Barrels Before they’re cut in half to become charming garden planters, wine barrels are reused by wineries from one harvest to the next. New barrels, when used to ferment or age wine for the first time, give the wine a stronger oak character than barrels that have previously held wine. It is similar to the idea of trying to reuse a teabag—a lot of the color, aroma, and flavor get steeped out the first time around.
Size of the Barrels In this case, size matters—smaller barrels give the wine more oak character than large barrels. The reason is that in a smaller barrel, the wood surface area proportional to the volume of wine is higher, so you get more oak taste and scent. Some wineries use oak vats as large as Winnebagos. They don’t give any oak character to the wine. Commonly used barrels include the barrique (buh-REEK), traditional to French red Bordeaux, which holds 225 liters (about 20 cases), and the Burgundy barrel (in French, pièce, pronounced pee-YESS), which holds 228 liters and is traditional to French red and white Burgundy. In North America and the Southern Hemisphere, the first is used often for full-bodied red varietals; the latter for Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays.
“Toast” of the Barrels At first, this always sounds strange to people, but it actually makes perfect sense. To curve and shape each barrel, the barrel maker, called a cooper, heats the wood by placing it over a fire. In the process, the interior gets toasted, or charred. This toasting affects the amount and style of oak flavor given to the wine. A light toast makes the wine lightly oaky; medium toast makes it more oaky; and heavy toast makes it very oaky. The reason is that toasting oak, like toasting bread, coffee beans, or marshmallows, caramelizes the starches, giving a stronger, richer flavor and a scent that tasters usually describe as toasty, smoky, sweet, or some combination of the three.
WHEN THE OAK CHIPS ARE DOWN
The bottle’s label says “barrel select,” yet the wine costs less than ten dollars. Knowing that oak barrels are one of the most luxurious ingredients in winemaking, you may well ask, How do they do it? It might be called a form of recycling. In making and repairing oak barrels, wineries and barrel manufacturers build up a supply of leftover pieces of wood. Resourceful companies put these chips and fragments of wood to good use as “seasoning” for their bargain-priced bottles, whose market price would never pay back the cost of actually aging in oak barrels. Some wine experts are snobby about this, calling it an imitation technique. I think that when skillfully employed, oak chips are a very good thing indeed—they make the oaky flavor so many people like affordable.
Sweet oak? Yes, sweet, but not sugary. I am often asked about this description, which you sometimes see in the winemaker notes on the back labels of bottles. Think how sweet-tasting an onion becomes if you cook it slowly letting it brown and caramelize. And nature is full of aromas that smell sweet without the presence of a lot of sugar. Spices, such as cloves and cinnamon, are a great example of sweet scents that are not sugary and some tasters note these spicy scents when drinking wines that are oaky. Vanilla is another one—everyone is taken by the sweet scent of a vanilla bean or vanilla flavoring, but on its own vanilla isn’t sugary. Vanilla is a term very often used by professional tasters