Vinegar interrupted, or why we ought not hate on oak.
Wine, at its most basic, is but vinegar interrupted. The sugar in grapes will ferment and that wine will spoil with acetic acid bacteria turning it to vinegar. The role of the winemaker in all this is to stay the inevitable. To nudge the broiling ferment into the direction of wine. In this endeavor they find themselves in a continuing dialogue with oxygen, both as an ally in terms of its role in mediating the development of phenolic structure (one of the many reasons why the brutally tannic wines of young Bordeaux are mostly a thing of the past) but also as a most pernicious of foes. It’s oxygen exposure (along with shitty hygiene) which is most likely to lead your lovingly grown grapes down the path to vinegary perdition.
Our now non-vinegary, deliciously wine flavoured product also has another major flaw. It’s a liquid and as such will need to be contained within something non or mostly non porous.
A messy tangle of barrels in an unused part of a winery in Serbia.
It’s here that we first encounter oak.
Allegedly it was the Gauls who first introduced the Romans to the art of tonnellerie (barrel making), diverting the more northerly reaches of the empire away from the ceramic focused trade in amphora and wines fermented in earthborn and earthbound qvevri.
What we think of as new oak flavours are a very modern development, for most of its time spent nurturing young wine, oak was a neutral partner. Witness the majesty of walking through a classic Barolo cellar, the boulevards of botti standing sentinel over their youthful charge. The wine contained within emerges snarling and potent.
Botti chez Mascarello
We don’t really see new oak in the winemaking dialogue until the post war era. The great enologist of the age, Emile Peynaud was concerned with improving the cellar hygiene of the Bordeaux estates that he worked with. Much of this came down to the replacing of old and problematic barrels in the cellars. The influx of new oak barrels changed the wines that were being made. This wasn’t uncontroversial, indeed the dialogue at the time rather closely matched the more recent barriques in Barolo fisticuffs that dominated the Piedmont through the late 90s.
Around the same sort of time the Californians and Australians were unravelling the secrets of Burgundian Chardonnay making. Malolactic fermentation to soften the wine’s acidity and add an appealing butteryness, a touch of extra toast to the pristine new oak barrels to add spice to the extracted tannic structure.
And just like that the world turned upside down. *
For as long as the Europeans had been making wine they had sought ripeness; power and puissance were the watch words, the greatest vintages were those where long hot summers had imbued the vintage with precious extra degrees of alcohol. Texts spoke longingly of les galets, the pudding stones of Chateauneuf, and how they stored the sun’s heat to reflect it in the night. However, now, these upstart regions found that ripeness almost too easy to come by, there were no bad vintages, only variations on excellence.
It’s here that oaken vessels start to get their bad name. German post war industrial developments had gifted the world temperature controlled stainless steel tanks (along with sterile filtration) and as such the necessity of large oaken vats was no more. Winemakers started to look to oak for its other properties. Shorn of the need to split logs into wildly wasteful staves as part of eye wateringly expensive oak barrels, winemakers started to experiment with oak barrel alternatives. Toasted staves to dip into your steel tank of Chardonnay, large evenly toasted chips of fine Troncais oak to add texture and precisely calibrated tannins to your premium Cabernet. While none of these uses are inherently wrong, they conspired to rob the character of oak of its mystique. It became the background flavour to any number of run of the mill wines that now started to taste tired and ubiquitous.
Furthermore, the use of oak barrel alternatives failed to allow the more subtle aspects of elevage in barrel or botti to come into play. The fine pores of the wood store minute amounts of oxygen which are transferred into the wine as it ages, this is where the changes to texture we alluded to earlier take place. This is how the sharp angularity of steel tank Sauvignon gets rounded, the polyphenols polymerising to create something akin to sensuality of mouthfeel. How the grippiest of Malbec tannins get turned into the texure of rich plush pate sable.
As with all things wine related, there are rarely any solidities or absolute definites. Visiting any wine region will yield cellars full of barrels; and winemakers with barrel programs will always have a portion of new barrels brought into the rotation as older barrels cease to be usable or no longer behave exactly as they would like.
In many modern cellars we see various ceramic vessels added to the mix imparting different micro-oxygenation properties and giving winemakers some extra textures and flavours to add to their blending palate. For those with an historical bent there is a pleasing circularity to seeing the descendents of the Gauls turn back to the children of the eastern Mediterranean’s ceramic vessels, and for those that love good wine there’s much to celebrate we’re now in a blessed age where great winemakers across the world are using oak barrels as part of their elevage repertoire to make brilliant wines the variety and quantity of which we’re never seen.
* “Immigrants, we get the job done“ is particularly apt when considering those of a Croatian descent named Michael and the making of world beating, Burgundy baiting Chardonnays. The 1973 Chateau Montelena made by Mike Grgich won the 1976 Judgement of Paris and he went on to be one of the pre-eminent winemakers of his generation.
Michael Brajkovic has been similarly genre defining with his tenure at his families Kumeu River. In particular he’s been the person most closely associated with the modern understanding of reduction in Chardonnays and how to manipulate it with wild yeast ferments and levels of suspended particulates in must (turbidity); something you can barely escape from winemakers discussing nowadays.