A recent trip to napa/sonoma has gotten my gears turning about oak usage and how it varies across different wines. Additionally the discussion here: (Adam Lee On Changes in Oregon vs. California for Pinot Noir) has me wanting to try and spark up more technical discussions. There is a wealth of knowledge on here to be shared.
To cut to the chase: What does the phrase ‘oak integration’ mean to you, and what would you do in the cellar in order to better ‘integrate’ oak flavors? Is this something you are even thinking about?
I tasted a few wines this trip that were heavily oaked, I greatly enjoyed all three and wouldn’t have guessed they used a such a heavy portion of new oak. The Titus tasted the most ‘oaky’ but was still well integrated and happened to be the lowest percentage of new.
2018 Ramey Annum -100% new french
2022 Smith Madrone Cabernet Franc -100% new french
2022 Titus Estate Reserve Cab -85% new french
When I asked how they integrate the oak so well, I got three different answers. Martin at Ramey cellars says that Dave Ramey likes to barrel down ‘hot’. Fresh off the press when the juice is a few degrees warmer they rack to barrel immediately. François at Smith Madrone says that they use only tight grain oak and do as little as possible once the wine is in barrel, set it and forget in mentality. I believe Titus presses their reds on the early side around 5-8 brix, to allow more fermentation in barrel.
Like many things in wine, I cant imagine there will be a concrete answer here. Many factors are at play. I am really curious to here the different perspectives and thought processes taken in the cellar surrounding oak selection and usage.
“You can’t over-oak a wine, you can only under-wine the oak”
@Mel_Knox did you come up with that? I’ve heard it attributed to you before…
We put our Chardonnay into barrel as hot juice as well. I do think it helps integrate the oak better. I also do a salt wash on our new oak to remove some of the harshness. I also only use light long toast, always tight grain.
Not expecting much here, but do we have any theories as to why the hot juice helps? Id be curious to do a trial with identical wine and barrels at 5 degree increments.
For me it isn’t so much the temperature of juice, it’s the fact that it’s not fermenting. I used to get ferment started in tank, get nutrient adds in, then barrel down once the brix drops to 19-20.
When I am writing on Evangelical Winemaking Today I usually say that I prayed and Jesus came to me and gave me the answer. Jesus did say not to put old ideas into new goatskins and that might lead us to the real answer.
First, I was visiting winery in Oregon that was putting some thin wine into a barrel and asking why the wine wasn’t genius. I kept my mouth shut then but that’s when the idea was born.
Second, when I started selling barrels wineries made Chardonnay and Pinot completely differently than now:
Pinot went into barrels after ML, sometimes as late as Spring.
Chardonnay was tank fermented, then barreled down. Sometimes wine was filtered into barrel…voila..instant oak juice…Remember the centrifuge?? Sometimes the winery was air conditioned but the humidity was low.
When Lalou was saying that lees nourish the wine, people here thought lees could lead to problems.
One cooperage used to seal the insides of the barrel with a fish based glue. This prevented leaks and prevented the wine from getting too oaky.
I owe my career to barrel fermentation of whites and humidification of cellars! That and repping good coopers!
Now my questions:
1/what do you mean by hot?? Do you heat the must?? Mind you, I remember visiting a winery where they fermented chardonnay at around 45F. The wine got dry in March and smelled like bubble gum…without the baseball cards! This was around 1978 on Howell Mountain.
2/You use real salt?? Some Burgundians use ammonia salt. I always ask myself, are they just removing the toast?? Is there some chemical process involved?? You tell me!
I think most bigger reds going into new oak are fermented above 80F these days, so for this example lets say 80+ F
Thanks for yours insight! Do you still sell barrels? If you are based in SF feel free shoot me a DM, id love to have you up at the tasting room to chat about oak!
Joe Davis explained what he learned in Burgundy, and then did at Arcadian. Basically what wecsid at Harrington. It’s not “hot”, per se, but not cold. He explained a conceptualization about how a wine that’s settled first is cold going into barrel and the oak pores close up. We just called it barreling down “down and dirty”, going direct from press.
Maybe it’s really only about the lees and not the initial temperature. Maybe it effects what’s extracted from the oak in the first place, or maybe it’s only about polymerization.
I should note he was talking about the practices of some top Burgundy producers who use 100% new oak, where the oak is not prominent.
I’d lean towards it being about the polymerization of oak tannins, where settling a wine before barreling down takes away ingredients that would aid the process.
Some other anecdotes are with barrel fermentation, or tossing oak chips into a red wine must. That the available oak compounds are utilized as part of the biochemical pathway of the fermentation, helping to tame (polymerize) the grape tannins, among other things.
The other anecdote I’ve seem posted on this forum and i think Mel was referring to, is wine in barrel picks up oak to a maximal point. Past that point, with all the ingredients needed, the tannins polymerize and the wine gets less oaky, more integrated. If you panic and remove the wine from barrel, you end up with the oakiest wine.
Well that was an obtuse answer. I would expect nothing less from you! I will keep crediting the quote to you until you tell me otherwise.
I dissolve ice cream salt in hot water for the barrel prep. One heaping handful in 5 gallons of hot water, double it for big barrels. Swirl around and let sit over night. I heard about it from my wife, I trialed it on half my new oak the next harvest and liked it. Science!
This is really interesting because from what I have learned from the spirits world is that this expanding and contracting of the oak pours should make the wine more oaky. That’s the reason bourbons aged in Texas are so dark and oaky is that extreme diurnal shift accentuates this effect. I guess this would only happen once as the hot wine expands the pours then the cool cellar contracts them one final time? interesting to think about. I suppose the wine being fresh off the press would leave a lot of solids in suspension so hard to isolate the variables here.
Reluctant to jump.in but…I always viewed oak as an accent to the flavor profile. I viewed oak like makeup to a woman. A beautiful woman with the right amount of makeup, can be epic. When a less attractive woman lays the stuff on heavily to compensate its a bad look. My point is I’ve known many winemakers who had a less than stellar wine and tried to cover up flaws with too much ‘makeup’. It usually didn’t work.
A better saying might be, How you make the wine impacts the oak, but that is a little boring.
To me, the bad thing is putting clean juice or wine into new barrels…unless you really prefer oak to wine.,
We have not discussed how seasoning of the staves impacts the tastiness of the wine.. For another day.
Todd,
What is great about the wine biz is that we are all free to do what we see is right. I hope all is going well for you.
Re wood seasoning; what we found out is that the longer the seasoning of the wood, the less toasty the wine tasting, regardless of toast level. We did experiments at Saintsbury in the late 80s and more at Obsidian Ridge ten years ago.