It felt ponderous and less vibrant. Of all the btls we drank that night it was the btl with the most left in it. About 1/3 left over. Didn’t seem flawed just not appealing or interesting compared to the rest of lineup. For me it felt modern like a big modern Spainish wine even though, as others have said here, its not made in modern style. I except that as fact and assume 5-7 will cure all.
I opened one of these recently, FWIW. I didn’t find any flavors that I’d call oaky, but it wasn’t a very good wine at this point. Ponderous for sure. I too expect that it will smooth out with time.
Michael
I remember that '07 you brought to our CdP dinner a couple (three?) years ago; like you, I was surprised it showed as modern/big/ripe/overblown as it did. But, if the '03 was like that at one point in time, then I’d say there’s hope yet for the '07.
To me, the descriptor ‘tastes and/or smells oaky’ is one of the most often used, but most misunderstood or misapplied out there. I have poured folks wines that were all stainless steel fermented and aged, but some have commented on the ‘oaky overtones’ or the ‘richness that obviously is due to oak’. I’ve tasted unoaked wines with others who were convinced the wine had been aged using 100% new heavy toast oak barrels. And I have been around others tasting wines that were in new oak for 2 years and, to me, were quite ‘oaky’ only to hear others say that they did not notice the oak at all - that it has ‘integrated nicely’ and was ‘not apparent’.
How can such divergent thoughts and opinions be given on the exact same wine? Well, let’s just cut to the chase - it’s wine, darn it, and nearly everything about wine is ‘subjective’. One winemakers ‘sweet spot’ for VA is anothers ‘over the top and sickingly too high’. One consumers ‘earthiness’ is anothers ‘corked’ descriptor.
Yep, we are dealing here on this board with generally ‘more wine educated’ folks, but that does not rule out the subjectivity that is overbearingly there all of the time.
This thread has been interested because a number of folks have described, from THEIR perspective, what an ‘oaked’ wine is, but there really is no consensus whatsoever.
Cheers . . .
Maybe. I would describe 07 in general as quite ripe, very voluptuous wines. I would describe 03 in general as extremely ripe, overripe, and often roasted. I’m not a fan of either vintage, but if you held a gun to my head I’d pick 07.
Greg Lafolette once mentioned to me that certain strains of yeast can produce oak impressions in red wine.
But I like Larry’s comments, too.
Best, Jim
I still remember the first Lagier Meredith Syrah I had (99 vintage, which is STILL one of the best Cali Syrahs ever made - I mean current bottles, and probably for the next 20 years). I posted a tasting note, mentioning some oak overtones I detected. Carole came on to let me know that they use no new oak (all 3 years and older). So whatever those notes were, they were from the grapes (or maybe the yeast). A recent bottle of that wine showed no sign of any oak.
Of course, now that I know Carole and Steve a lot better, and realize that Steve is as strong as a mighty oak, maybe it was just Steve’s essence infused into the wine 
Craig, sorry if I missed it somewhere in the thread but did you taste it blind, and at the time of the tasting did the people there know it had no oak or was that info from later?
Craig, only one or two other people in the group besides myself knew anything about the producer. I think everyone tasted it with mostly no expecatations about the style or producer. The wine is not available locally in my market. I have been buying and drinking them since the 04 vintage but had only today bothered to look it up in my Karis CDP book to see what Harry said about the style. I had assumed in the past that it was a cross between traditional & modern but more in traditional camp. With the '07 and now the '10 vintage I have begun to wonder if Charvin is no longer in my wheelhouse. Perhaps my palate has evolved in a some way too. Maybe I don’t know traditional when I taste it because this struct me as very modern. Opening the VT last night and absolutely loving it made me wonder again about the recent 10 Charvin I drank. I’ll probably stop buying Charvin and see what my current btls taste like when they hit 10yrs plus.
Similar thing happened to me recently. I picked up some oak spice from a bottle of '10 Pegau Reservee, and it was pointed out to me that the wine sees no new oak.
Charvin doesn’t use new oak . What you identified as oak probably comes from the lees and will disappear in time . Wines from Coche Dury are often described as having excessive new oak , even if the wine never sees any new oak but is aged in older barrels .
I have often noticed that new oak markers are not the same for american and for european palates (well again gross generalities…). Sweet vanilla/caramel aromas that european generally see as coming from new oak are often put into the “fruit” category by plain US drinkers.
Bourbon is a good exemple : I tried hard to introduce european friends to artisanal bourbon but they couldn’t go over the phenomenal taste of swett oak that US drinkers can handle by culture.
On the other hand, whole cluster aromas, especialy from ripe years (03, 07, 09 in the rhone) are very often seen by US drinkers as typical of oak aging.
Not so much by europeans.
I had a wine from 09 that was described here and some other places are “modern” and “oaky”, that was aged in concrete and made the exact same way than any other vintage… and was well received in Europe due to its “vegetal, almost chlorophyllian component” that was supposed to give some freshness to the wine in the context of the vintage.
Woody, ripe vegetal aromas coming from the stems or the skins for some varietals and vintages, seem to be seen less external to the wine by European drinkers.
Cheers
Eric
Lignin is used to synthasize vanillin which could, with a little more understanding of the chemistry, support the theory that ripe stems included in the fermentation process throw off vanillin.
I recently had a discussion with a board member regarding this exact topic. I have often suspected that “hyper oak sensitive” was, at best, a poorly understood disorder. I suffer(ed) from this disorder and have had bottles like the one described in this thread which called my understanding of my oak sensitivity into question.
Malolactic fermentation can produce propionic acid which, in turn, produces a roasted / chocolate smell in red wine. Malolactic fermentation can also produce diacetyl which smells buttery. Raspberries and butter also contain a small amount of vanillin. Apart from raspberry all of these smells are also associated with oak. My point is a lot of these smells, and specifically their origin, are not as simply distinguishable as one might like to believe.
Olfactory perception is anything but simple and my amateur understanding is that association plays a big role. We attempt to break the smell into elements, identify each element and then search for comparables in our memory. The outcome of our quick analysis usually starts “that smells like…”.
The use of wood might have been introduced for practical reasons (easier to transport than a clay amphorae) but I don’t think it was very long before it was appreciated because it “enhanced” the natural smells of wine. Barrel aging only “improves” (read: amplifies) those raspberry, vanillin, chocolate and roasted characteristics (or adds the ones which were missing because of a less ripe vintage).
So I wonder if smelling a very ripe wine made with stems doesn’t cause our brain to rebuild that into a conclusion of “that smells like an oak barrel”. Processing raspberry, vanilla, chocolate and roasted scents that seem more “pumped up” might trick our brain into believing new wood was the culprit for the abnormally strong character of those smells. This might fit with Daniel Kahneman’s Availability Heuristic. People judge the probability of an event by how easy it is to think of an example of that event. Most of us have had far more over-oaked wines than we have had examples of overly-ripe wines made with stems. 99% of wines discussed on this board were aged in wooden barrels. My guess is “less than 20%” were made with stems and came from ripe vintages (another discussion to be had but let’s say 2003 + 2007 + 2009) were overly ripe and the rest between 2000-2010 were either ripe or short of ripe). When we detect overt / over-the-top rich raspberry, vanilla, chocolate and roasted scents we tend to think, “that smells like new oak” simply because that scenario is more accessible in our mind’s catalogue of experiences. We simply don’t drink enough non-oaked wine for our brains to first consider “maybe the vanillin is from the lignin in the stems used during vinification”.
That seems reasonable enough.
Yeast
Great posts Eric and Paul; thank you. I believe this is the explanation for some of our experiences.
One other way that wine can smell “oaky” is that some types of reduction can smell like char.
FWIW, I once made a pinot that saw zero wood of any kind and did not have any stems and had a clear “woody” character to it. I was a bit surprised.
Musty cardboard and wet dog sound like TCA to me.
There are other wines that I have seen described as Oaky that never seem oaky to me. For me there are two parts to oaky- One is the flavors (vanilla, toast, char, etc) the other is the tannins- which in my experience tend to be rougher than grape tannins. When I think of oaky wines, I generally think some of each category.
Disclaimer: I’m an engineer working for a bank in Switzerland. My contributions are based on my thoughts and my ideas. I yield to the hands on experience of someone like Eric (and the other vigneron who generously share their experience on this board).
As for the Pinot smelling like wood…someone not too long ago found a yeast that made gamay smell like bananas. The universe of fungi and bacteria is amazing. I won’t pretend to know much about the complexity of the reactions which pass during alcoholic and malolactic fermentation but a wine that smells like bananas certainly inspires imagination of just how much influence yeast and bacteria have in wine.
Eric; I agree and have seen this occur in other '03s as well.
Cheers!
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