Is nothing sacred? Thanks to Switzerland’s Cybox Company, we now have the square wine barrel. I guess it was bound to happen. Traditional barrel shapes were doomed the day France adopted the metric system, and couldn’t figure out how many hogsheads to the deciliter.
Barrels have been getting a bad rap lately, anyway, what with some chardonnays going better with the dining room table than with the food upon it. More and more wines proudly proclaim their un-oaked status.
In some cases this is a slightly disingenuous selling point, along the lines of: CORNFLAKES: NOW - 100% SNAIL-FREE! Some wines, in fact, have always eschewed wood. Others are only aged there after fermenting in steel. Still others, like the students at my high school who took drivers- and sex-ed in the same car, are fermented and aged in the same oak barrel.
Long before they were a seasoning, barrels were high-tech storage and mailing units, far less breakable than amphorae. A fortuitous side effect was evaporation: as water and alcohol leave the wine, flavor concentrates. Other chemical reactions affect texture; making wine softer, rounder and lush in the mouth.
While Balsamic vinegar goes through a rainbow of different woods, so far only a few species of white oak work for wine. For a while, only French oak could cut it. Early American barrels, made by whiskey coopers, had desultory results. The looser grain of American oak, plus the fact that whiskey staves were sawed rather than split like French planks, put more wood surface in contact with the wine. Another difference was that French coopers dry their planks outside for at least 24 months, while Americans, always in a hurry, used a kiln. Two years of wind and rain changes wood chemicals considerably. When American coopers copied French methods, their barrels became respectable, though they retain a distinctly different accent. As do barrels from Hungary, Poland and wherever oak is grown.
Searing barrels over fire was originally done to seal wood fibers and strengthen the staves. Nowadays, winemakers order light, medium or heavy toast for the flavors they impart, although this doesn’t work quite the way you might think. For instance, new studies show that more charring results in less smoky wine.
The flavor wars escalated. Since oak goes neutral after a few years of use, wineries began using more and more new wood. You’ll even see claims of “200% New Oak!,” made possible by racking wine out of one series of brand-new barrels and into another.
The spicy-sweet vanilla and brash coconut aromas from oak can, and often do, cover a world of sins; the chief one being weak, flavorless wine. Yet Americans happily lap up these oakshakes. The rest of the world blames our national sweet tooth. A natural result, they assert, of parents who filled our baby bottles with Coke (instead of beer, like I’ve seen them do in Germany.) Some of our more patriotic nursing mothers, they suspect, actually lactate Pepsi.
I have a different theory: For a brief, shining moment, oak simplified things. Compared to exotica like “white stone-fruit” and “bramble,” the whiff of vanilla was easy to recognize. Even better, it was a seal of approval: a guarantee of high-quality wine.
But the riffraff went and ruined that. They flooded the market with fakes: Subway-vendor-Rolex wines that tasted like they’d been in expensive oak barrels, but hadn’t. This is accomplished by tossing in oak beans, oak chips, oak extract or nylon-mesh teabags full of oak shavings. Other foak legends include staves that float up and fan out and the mysterious oak matrix; all available in French, American, Hungarian or Polish wood; single, double, treble-toasted or raw.
Another rule-of-thumb - whacked off at the knuckle. So here we are again, out in the wilderness with no compass and only our palates to guide us. It’s tempting to do the trendy thing, and eschew anything that ever touched a tree. But then you’d be missing some amazing complexity that purely fruit-driven wines can’t begin to approach.
Also, a chance to taste history. The very last tree, from an oak forest planted by Louis XIV to supply timber for navy ships, just sold to a Bordeaux cooper for $45,600. Planted in 1669, Le Chêne de Morat is 40 meters high and 15 feet around and should yield about 60 barrels after they fell it this spring. I’d give my matrix for a taste of that.
Use the pairs below to discover your own preference, or, better, learn to love some of each.
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