Monday, January 21 2008
Over a Barrel
Lost in the wood: barrel cellar
For many folks nothing says quality like the scent of vanilla, toast and wood coming off of a glass of wine. Others (like me) think there can easily be too much of a good thing. I'm constantly chiding people about drinking 'Chateau Plywood' or 'Splinter Cellars'. For me, the grapes should provide the tannin and structure for a wine, and oak should be like a condiment—I'm not interested in ketchup as a main course.
Oak’s delicate vanilla scent and complex toastiness can enhance the fruit flavours and aromas already present in a wine, helping form a complex bouquet. On the other hand the inappropriate use of oak can damage a delicate wine beyond repair, and an oak overdose can take so many years to die off that the wine passes from youth to maturity to feeble old age before the strong woody flavours are softened enough to make it drinkable.
The first decision for consumer winemakers is whether to use oak at all. Commonly, only full-bodied red wines and richly flavoured whites like Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc are treated with oak. Also, because oak can give an intense flavour impression, only premium wines are treated; less expensive juices and blends aren’t helped by oaking. When in doubt, ask a seasoned wine-maker what he/she recommends, call the wine-making stores in your area, or check some of the wine books available.
The next decision will be to choose a form of oak. Several things will influence your decision: the amount of money you want to spend, how much room and how much wine you have, and what type of oak flavour you want. When it comes to adding wood to a wine the first thing on people's minds is a barrel.
Barrels
The traditional image of the wine-making cellar is of the cellar master, his face lined with the wisdom of experience, drawing a crimson stream of wine from his massive, sturdy oak barrel. Behind him, row after row of barrels sleep with their precious contents growing more potent and valuable with each passing year. It’s a pretty picture, but the truth is only the finest and highest priced wineries can afford to use new oak, and some fine New World wineries don’t use barrels at all.
The true magic of an oak barrel lies not only with its ability to impart woody flavour, but also from a plethora of reactions between oak and wood, one of which causes water and alcohol to evaporate in equal measure. This concentrates the remaining wine, increasing all of its flavours. This also makes it necessary for you to top up the barrel periodically to prevent the ullage (airspace) from oxidizing your wine.
There are theories about the effects of tight bunging, vacuum ullage, and whether the topping actually causes more oxidation than it prevents, but they really move beyond theory into the realm of barrel philosophy. In the end a barrel is more than the sum of the oak flavours it can impart.
Counting the Cost Part One: A Small Barrel
A barrel is expensive. Even a small (19 litre) barrel will cost over $150.00. This might fit into your budget but there’s another cost incurred by barrels that wine books never talk about. Once a barrel has had wine in it you must keep it full of wine, forever. Barrels are very difficult for consumer winemakers to store empty (you can’t fill it with water, which spoils quickly). If you don’t keep it full of wine it can be attacked by acetobacteria (vinegar), mould, fungus and rot, at which point you must throw away the barrel. Commercial wineries can and do store barrels empty. However they have access to sanitation protocols and technology not usually available to consumer winemakers—things like ozone generators and labs to test for bacterial counts. Nearly every barrel I've ever been asked to 'take a look at' has been stored empty and gone off despite the sanitation attempts of the owner.
At first glance this doesn’t seem like such a hardship. After all, if you’re going to buy a barrel you’ll want to keep your wine in it until it’s ready to bottle, right? Not necessarily. In a small barrel the flavours of oak are transferred very quickly into the wine. This is due to the ratio of barrel surface area to liquid volume. Small barrels have a lot of oak surface in relation to the volume of wine inside them. A 19 litre barrel will have about 200 square centimetres of oak per litre of wine. Used on a Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc, the barrel will have imparted enough oakiness in 4 to 5 days. At that point the wine must come out or it will become so oaky it will taste like extract of plywood. Then you must have another batch of wine ready to go in the barrel immediately. If the next wine is a red, it will probably be oaky enough in 2 to 3 weeks. It is then time to rack a new batch of wine into the barrel. This one may last 4 to 6 weeks. Eventually the oakiness subsides in the barrel and you can leave your batch in for a full year. You will probably need 8 to 10 batches in the first year, a considerable investment in not only wine, but also in primary and secondary fermenters necessary to ensure that your wine is ready as you need it.
Another thing to consider when costing out the care and feeding of an oak barrel is the topping wine necessary. If your cellar has low humidity or warms up in the summer you will experience considerable evaporation, as much as half a litre a week under the worst conditions. You must top this up or the ullage will spoil your wine. So you need even more wine just to keep up with what cellar masters call “The Angels Share”. A 19 litre barrel could need almost as much wine to fill it the first year as a 225 litre barrel.
So are large barrels the perfect answer? We'll tackle that tomorrow.
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