A pox on oak

WINE TALK
21

Interesting question.

Is there a Musigny produced without any new oak?

Kevin H. (and other Burgundy lovers and Pinot producers), what’s your take on this?

22

How much oak does Drouhin use in her Musigny. I know her Petits Monts is only 20% new. This producer-to me- has- again, for me- the right amount of oak/balance in her wines.

23

Robert,
I can’t think of a Musigny that doesn’t see new oak. The closest would be Mugnier (20-25%) while Vogue and Drouhin are around 33-45%. (Of course the type of oak matters a lot and I think Mugnier and Vogue show much more than their % but that is a digression).

Top of mind for Grand Cru’s without oak would be Ponsot. Next might be Fourrier’s Griotte (20%ish). There are lots of 1ers with minimal oak influence (Fourrier, Barthod, Clavelier).

It think it is clear that you can make great Grand Cru Burgs without much new oak…

24

And that’s a critical distinction - many/most Burgs at the GC level see oak but very few see 100% new oak.

For me, this is pretty simple: wine is a beverage that showcases what a particular variety of grape can do in a particular place, during a particular vintage. Anything that obscures that is a problem and needs to justify its existence. What that means in practice is that lots of new oak and/or heavily toasted oak, are bad things. I want to taste the grape, not the additives.

Oh god, I’m a natural wine freak…

25

I’m pretty much in agreement with this as modified. I am sure Alan was trying to be provocative and that’s fine, but I think condemning the use of oak in all wines as a sort of religious precept is, um, wrong. As are most other religious precepts, in wine as well as in religion.

26

Two nights ago I had a 2002 Paul Hobbs Cabernet. To my taste over-oaked. I’ll let you know in five years whether or not it has improved with time.

27

This is partly of producers’ doing, IMHO. Since cash flow is king, it seems like many get reds out less than two years after harvest. If selling an integrated wine is important, then they need to hold back longer. Producers at the same time are making riper, softer wines that are meant to drink younger. Perhaps the oak should be matched to the fruit character and intent. There’s no point in heavily oaking wines that don’t have much long term upside.

I just read it as a mixed message, I suppose. Producers want the wines to be held, but they’re clearly structured for near term consumption. And they sell the wines so young that only people with real storage capacity will be able to let them come together for a few years. The options are to make harder wines that people have to age a bit (but these will not sell well in a tasting room . . . .) or softer wines that come into balance early.

28

Greg,

Some great points indeed. The economics of making wine certainly have changed quite a bit over the past decade, and the holding costs, especially for smaller wineries, have become too great relative to the cash flow needed to keep businesses running. Does that mean that oak usage should be reconsidered in some cases? Sure - but the consumer is ‘voting their approval’ of these wines by purchasing them. Things will not change unless the wines don’t sell - then the wineries will be forced to truly change what they do.

Cheers.

29

Yep. Oak has it’s place. New oak has its place, in moderation. But having spent the past two days at Family Winemakers, and tasting several wines that are heavily oaked, it was a little sad to me to see those wines overwhelmed by the oak. In one case, I tasted two bottles of the same wine/vintage. One with low oak, and one that was 100% new. The low oak version was beautiful and pure, and should age and develop wonderfully for years. The 100% oak version buried that gorgeous fruit under a blanket of oak and vanilla flavors.

It’s like too much makeup or gaudy clothing on a beautiful woman. Or salt: if you can taste it in a dish, it’s too much. Or spice: if it blows your brains out its too much.

Some winemakers fall back on using 100% new oak for everything, every time, and in my book almost no wine needs it (including Haut Brion, which according to my info uses less than 50% new oak in most years). In reality, I don’t really care that much, there are plenty of wines out there that suit my tastes. But as a purist, and a bit of evangelist on the topic, I’m convinced many people who have come to expect these flavors in their wines would enjoy them even more if they recognized how oak changes a wine.

Cheers

30

Neal, I know you were a little TIC, but I found this interview from Tom Cannavan’s Wine-pages.com of interest:

“M. Delmas has been in charge of winemaking for fully forty years; the position he inherited from his father. Throughout that time his vision has been clear and uncluttered: to make a Haut-Brion that is “the most harmonious wine within its size”; in other words, to take the raw materials that the vintage has given him and treat them sympathetically. Delmas eschews the move towards what he calls “black wines”: wines that must be highly-extracted, dense and massive, even when produced from a weaker vintage. For example, only in a really top year will he employ close to 100% new oak barrels. He tempers this, down to 40% perhaps, according to the vintage, never wishing to overpower the quality of fruit and terroir. He says he is “trying to make wine, not a dilution of wood”! Some top Bordeaux estates have embraced a popular trend towards high concentration and charry, powerful oak. Some even employ must concentrating machines, to remove excess water from the juice in a dilute vintage. This trend must be anathema to M. Delmas.”

31

Of course we have to realize that our small group on the board here does not represent the typical wine consumer. Most people I know who are not wine geeks love all that new oak in their Cabs and Chards. Wineries have to sell to those people and I think that largely drives their winemaking style. I certainly know a number of winemakers who admit (at least privately) that if they had their way, they would not oak the wines they make as heavily, but often their hands are tied by the winery owners/marketing people/etc. who may dictate the wine style they believe will sell the best.

But all that is a good clue as to why I tend to gravitate toward smaller producers - many of whom are owner/winemakers - who have more freedom to make what they want to and who often use much less new oak, or at least make their wines in such a way that the oak is not the predominant characteristic. Of course for small producers working on a tight budget, that’s sometimes as much a financial decision as a winemaking one!

32

(EDIT) Seems Ken and I are right on the same page! Didn’t see his post until I finished writing mine.

Don’t forget that outside of this online microcosm of seasoned wine geeks, the general wine drinking population seems to really love flashy new oak in their wines.

I was just reminded of this recently when I poured tastes of my viognier to a primarily “non-geeky” wine crowd. The viognier was fermented in a stainless steel barrel and m/l was blocked. It’s a crisp and mineral-driven white wine, but still retains some of the richness innate in viognier which was exactly what I was hoping to create.

However, the reaction to the wine was pretty mixed; some really loved it and some didn’t know what to make of it. Granted, viognier is fairly esoteric outside of wine geekdom so that probably played a role as well. But, I think many people found the crisp acidity and the lack of sweet new oak flavors a little off-putting.

33

Ultimately, I’m kind of torn here. I don’t really like ‘tanky’ reds that are all just primary (sometimes borderline fake) fruit. Aging in a barrel or foudre seems to be necessary to help a wine develop greater depth. There is evidence that slow oxidation is actually helpful in forming stable phenolics in wine. Aging high quality wine in a material with zero oxygen permeability seems like an absolute waste to me.

On the flip side, heavy new oak usually dominates everything. It’s especially bad in new world wines that are already ultra-rich. My suspicion is high alcohol tends to leach out more oak-derived flavor as well. Some new oak seems beneficial to fill in a mid-palate gap, IMO, but if grapes are already super-ripe, that gap usually is non-existent.

34

Ha- ha-ha…even Yellow Tail is moving to the light side…

Now available… “Tree-free Chardonnay” [wow.gif]

35

This red herring pops up whenever we talk about wine styles and all it does is obscure the situation. By default, we’re talking about the level of wines that people who ARE wine geeks care about, from Muscadet to Musigny. That Joe Yellowtail might like Musigny with tons of oak doesn’t matter in the least since he’s not buying wine at that level. Similarly, most of us could care less what Yellowtail or Mondavi Woodbridge is like. The regular, every day version of Joe Sixpack doesn’t matter in these discussions.

36

A “red herring”? C’mon, gimme a break! Speculating about non wine geeks isn’t going to confuse anyone on this board. Although our Beserker community is badly afflicted with the wine bug, I think we can all follow along swimmingly. [tease.gif]

I don’t see any issue with keeping perspective; maybe it’s just me.

37

What I mean is that it’s usually raised as a “Well, but we need to keep these other people in mind…” when, in fact, we don’t. The entire non-geek community that drinks YT and like things simply aren’t relevant to us. They’re not the people who are buying Bordeaux futures, they’re not buying up 07 CdP because Parker loves it, they don’t care about percentage of new oak vs 2 year old oak, etc. They exist in a wine universe that’s parallel to ours but that rarely impinges on it (and vice versa).

38

Sorry, Rick, but I don’t agree at all. Can’t speak for Brett, but I’m not talking about low-end wines like Yellowtail or Woodbridge. I don’t have time to argue the point right now but I think it matters quite a bit and does affect the wines that we care about.

39

That seems like a large leap from your initial post (“a pox on oak”) to this one, where you admire a producer because they only use 100% new oak in some vintages, and sometimes as little as 40% new oak.

I think we can all agree that there are many wines out there that overuse new oak in a way that detracts from the wines, yet at the same time, nearly all red wines see oak, and most of the great wines of the world, including the favorites of the AFWE, see some new oak. It’s just a matter of finding the right balance.

To Rick Gregory’s point, the broader wine community is definitely relevant, at least to me, because I frequently dine and have drinks with them. My family, my neighbors, my coworkers, my friends – very few of them are people who subscribe to Tanzer or Burghound or post on this board, much less are card carrying members of the AFWE. So I’m not going to serve them, or order off the wine list, or give gifts to them, of some off-vintage Chinon or Bourguiel, when the reality is that most of them strongly prefer wines with ripe fruit and new oak (and yet these are not mostly people who drink Yellow Tail or 2BC either). And there are plenty of good examples of wines made in that style – not every wine with ripe fruit and oak is Mollydooker or Alto Moncayo.

40

This is true–there are consumers who will never consider buying as many here do–but there are plenty of people who have the money/willingness/interest to buy wines at a higher price point and also enjoy the influence of oak. Many of these folks likely even enjoy digging into the geekdom of a wine.

Tasting & pouring at Family Winemakers this weekend, I certainly saw evidence of this; oak influence runs the gamut, as do preferences (which are not always correlated with experience or knowledge).

Earlier today someone here posted a note on a Kongsgaard Judge Chardonnay, which he found obstructed by oak. Certainly many folks buying this level of wine have a bit of knowledge about how it was made & appreciate the geeky facts–it just so happens to one nerd it’s overoaked, to another nerd it’s spot on.

Just noting that geekiness & preference don’t always go hand in hand…like for many nerds in the US, some are into Star Wars and others are into Star Trek…different strokes… [cheers.gif]