Higher alcohol, IMO, exacerbates the perception of new barrels. You also get added texture with riper fruit and higher abv wines, that adding new barrels to is just piling on. Some people really enjoy the power and richness of the two combined. But I don’t think Seth does.
Another issue is whether the wines are completely dry or not. I don’t mean that they’re “sweet” but some shorter ferments can leave a gram or two still unfermented and that rs may or may not ferment out during elevage, especially if the abv is already robust the yeast have a hard time restarting to clean up small amounts of RS. That sweetness isn’t perceptible but it does change the balance.
We typically use bigger barrels for whites and since these are typically unavailable when buying used wood, we have to buy new. The size of the barrels means the ratio of wine to wood lowers the barrel impact but it’s pretty obvious that at 12.0% the new impact is nothing like when the wine is 13.5%. Reds are also consistent with this.
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I learned this lesson a hundred times before I really learned that % new oak doesn’t really mean as much as we consumers make it out to mean. Size of vessel, fruit characteristics, type of wood, treatment of wood, time in wood, fermentation vessel, etc all make enough difference in what I perceive to have rendered an “50% new oak” description to be borderline useless.
Whatever you do at Goodfellow with Chardonnay is absolutely rocking as my recent tasting established.
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Personally, I like a little oak influence in Chardonnay from most appellations, although emphasis on little. Chablis is great but also very special dirt. I think oak (of any age) also adds textural elements (well, stainless does, too, just different elements).
-Al
Marcus and Dan already touched on some aspect of it. Alcohol levels definitely affects oak extraction. Type of oak, size of barrel, its grain tightness and level of toast also affect the perceived amount of oak notes a wine gets. What is considered ‘neutral oak’ also varies widely, some consider a thrice used barrel as neutral while other require it to be used a few more times before it becomes ‘neutral’. The other ‘neutral’ vessels also changes the perception of a wine quite a bit . A wine made with 40% new oak, but with the remainder aged in stainless steel is very different from one where the remainder is aged in twice used oak.
And I would just add that some Chardonnays can have buttered-popcorn to butterscotch notes and many tasters assume this is from new oak. But I have had my share of these wines (sometimes, slight, moderate or heavy “buttery” notes) from wine I know saw no new oak (even here in Oregon). Research is now showing that Oeno. O. (MLF bacteria) when stressed will produce loads of diacetyl, the culprit compound. I agree with @ChrisJames that this type of style info should be in TNs and reviews, but just saying it can also be from non oak factors. (Can dig out the research reference if interested.)
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Please do. My chem prof better half would be interested.
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Not to mention that the amount of batonnage that one does can also play heavily into things and that some end up confusing the notes added from lees contact with oak influence
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I’ve never thought of butter as an oak issue. I’ve thought that it’s more a case of sloppy winemaking. Diacetyl can be a big flaw in beer that sees no oak and no MLF. Usually caused by incomplete or rushed fermentation.
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Marcus, not only do I like your wines, I really appreciate your posts here on the board. I almost always learn something from them.
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Haven’t chimed in here because I don’t have the vintage experience in making Chardonnay that folks mentioned here do and/or I don’t proportionally make the amount of Chardonnay compared to the other wines that I make. So, I think that while I am improving in this category, to date I have only released 5 vintages totaling less than 1,500 cases worth of production. This is all from Durant Vineyard, albeit my sources of fruit are different than both Marcus’ and Kelley’s since they get 100% of their fruit from a flatter, colder, marine soil section of the vineyard and I get 50% from there and the rest from further up the hill in a warmer, volcanic soil section. A while back Christophe Roumier told me that people are better off buying Pinor Noir from Chardonnay producers than Chardonnay from Pinot Noir producers. We were barrel tasting his 2007 and 2008 Corton-Charlemagne at the time. While the line is meant to be funny it also has a level of truth to it. Chardonnay, to me, is sort of like baking compared to cooking. You can make fine Chardonnay without being dedicated to the concept much as pretty much anyone can produce a muffin, however if you really want to make some pastry-level shit you have to be all the way fucking in.
This is what happened to Oregon around 12 years or so ago. The number of wineries that were pushing their chips into the pot on Chardonnay pre-2010 was not zero but it probably wasn’t a double digit number. We gave up after 2009. Patty used to call it “Pardon-Ay”. Probably not the best mindset to approach it with. Ken’s first vintage was 2009. He made 0 cases of Chardonnay and now they’re an institution with it. In less than a decade’s worth of time. Wineries, for a variety of reasons, committed to the creation of Chardonnay. Part of it was that it was obvious it could and should be done here, part of it was that people invested time and resources into learning how to do it, but a huge reason is that some wineries’ financial wherewithal, or a significant portion of it, depended on it working.
We have sort of been all-in which is to say we have not been all-in. 300 cases from Durant is a fraction of what we do. We make more Rose than we do Chardonnay. However, in 2019 we grafted over a portion of the vineyard that simply was not cut out for Pinot Noir (we planted it in 2000 and it just never gave any indication that the fruit was going anywhere significant) with cuttings we got from Doug Tunnell at Brick House. We will bottle the 2021 Estate Vineyard Chardonnay (very, very pleased with it) in April and I am selling the two presses I have owned for 7-16 years and buying two presses that will be far more versatile in the creation of Chardonnay as well as Pinot Noir.
It has been pretty amazing to see the transition the industry has taken over the past 25+ years on Chardonnay. The success of it is largely owed to some (sort of) young Turks that had a vision that never really truly existed here before. While I am a bit player in the whole scheme of it I am happy to be part of it and am doing my best to keep abreast of what the best of folks out there are doing.
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Very cool news about the Estate Chard. Do you have a sense at this point of how it differs from your Durant?
What do folks think about the frequent claim the biggest problem with early Oregon Chardonnay wines was mostly caused by using clones not suited to the climate in the Willamette Valley?
-Al
I know that claim, but I thought that was more a function of farming and wine making back in the early days. The Eyrie obviously makes great Chardonnay from some of the very earliest plantings. Crowley’s Four Winds is from Draper and Wente plantings. I’m not sure what clones are at Maresh, but I bet it’s not Dijon either.
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Yeah, always seemed like an explanation that was a little too easy.
-Al
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I visited the Willamette Valley several times between 2012 and 2015. Each time, a little more Chardonnay appeared in the tasting rooms.
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It was only the wrong clone because of the way it was handled and farmed up here. Davis 108 makes beautiful wine but you can’t just let it run willy-nilly in the vineyard and that’s mostly what happened.
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