With wine, it’s roll out the barrels

By Jana Saastad
News-Sentinel staff writer

Nutty. Smoky. Spicy. Woody.

Names from an all-male pop band? No, these are just some of the adjectives used to describe the aromatic characteristics of wine yielded from oak barrel aging.

There are more: Earthy, astringent, creamy, yeasty. The list goes on.

A winemaker is required to detect the subtle flavors in an effort to make the perfect wine.

What is the perfect wine? The answer is subjective. Every winemaker agrees that oak barrels are the only way to age wine.

“Wood is a fine vessel to send your wine through,” said Theresa Murphy, national marketing and sales coordinator for Peirano Estate Vineyard. “We are firm believers of oak.”

Some prefer French oak barrels; others like American oak.

David Lucas, owner of The Lucas Winery, opts for French barrels; ditto with Lance Randolph of Peirano Estate Vineyards. David Akiyoshi, winemaker at Robert Mondavi Woodbridge chooses American barrels. Julie Edelstein of Oak Ridge said her company uses 75 percent American, as does Olde Lockeford Winery.

Greg Burns of Jessie’s Grove and David Phillips of Phillips Vineyards split their barrel usage between both countries.

Whether French or American, one thing’s for sure: Oak barrels affect the vintage’s flavor.

“The barrel selection is one of the most artistic and stylistic areas for a winemaker,” Lucas said. “lt’s one of the areas that’s going to have influence on the variety, the vineyard, the year and the resulting wine.”

Akiyoshi listed three main reasons for using barrels.

First, to give some nice flavors to the wine, such as vanilla, spice, toasty and cloves.

Second, oak barrels help mature wine by allowing the incorporation of a very minute level of oxygen.

The third reason is to concentrate wine and allow both water and alcohol to evaporate out of wine two things that have very little flavor like reducing a sauce.

With the exception of chardonnay, most winemakers don’t age their white or blush wines in oak, but instead use stainless steel vats.

“Some of these wines don’t need oak barrel aging,” Phillips said. “There’s a lot of wines we don’t want to have an oak taste. Zinphony is one.” (Zinphony is a blush wine).

Most winemakers use a barrel for four years or harvest “picks.” A new barrel’s flavor is extremely “oaky.” By the second year, the oakiness is half as strong and by the third it’s half again as flavored. By year four, a barrel is considered “neutral,” thus it does not impart the strong oak flavors.

“We found whether it be French or American oak, an oak barrel when it’s new, the extract values can be intense and wonderful at the same time,” Burns said.

After serving the winemaker for four years, a wine barrel gets sawed in half and sold as garden planters or to spirit makers. Peirano recently sold barrels to a tequila maker.

The length of time wine spends in a barrel is another factor that affects taste and aroma.

“Typically our barrel aging is seven to nine months,” Murphy said.

“If you don’t monitor it (the wine in an oak barrel) closely, you lose the true essence of that fruit and pick up too much oak flavors.”

Lucas said monitoring the barrels is important.

“Not only is it (the wine) picking up the flavor, but it gets evaporated,” Lucas said. “I pour in about one to two cups of wine to keep it topped up.

“I think you can lose characteristics in a vintage that you didn’t even know were there.”

Barrels are not cheap. American barrels cost $185 to $400 each. French are more steep, costing between $500 to $750.

“Obviously they’re more expensive. But it’s more subtle. It doesn’t camouflage the natural taste,” Murphy said.

Typical European style barrels hold 255 liters or 288 bottles of wine.

“lt’s a time-tested size,” said Ed Schulz, sales manager for Barrel Associates lnternational of Napa.

Making a barrel is, well, no laugh. Crafted by barrel coopers, the job requires a high degree of diligence, patience and advanced craftsmanship.

“Coopers are some of the hardest-working people,” Schulz said.

Barrels have been instrumental in food and beverage storage for a millennium.

“Every kind of food stuff was stored in some sort of barrel,” Schulz said. “Barrels solved a big problem for food storage. Otherwise, how do you carry a big amount food stuff anywhere? lmagine carrying beer around in a burlap sack?”

It took several years for a journeyman cooper to develop the skills to made a barrel tight enough to hold beer and strong enough to be bounced about by a powerful man.

“It was one of the greatest inventions. It made the dark ages a little less dark,” Schulz said.

Before a cooper gets busy jointing staves, exceptional wood is selected from specific forests. Most of the American wood comes from Ozarks, the Midwest and Appalachians. Coopers look at the soil composition, the grain structure of the wood, environmental factors and the climate as fastidiously as a chef chooses herbs and vegetables from a garden.

Mendocino Cooperage of Hopland, Calif., stated that the terroir, or origin of the oak, of its barrels has a significant role in defining the characteristics imparted by the wood to the wine.

How the barrel is prepared has a huge affect on the wine’s taste.

When the head of a barrel is toasted, it creates toast-derived flavors such as sweet, creamy, yeasty, to name a few. Water-bent treatment creates subtle smoke, earth and vanilla flavor and fire-bent treatment produces pungent, spicy and wood smoke tones.

Winemakers buy specific barrels for specific varietals.

Napa Valley is filled with coopers, many of whom fulfill Lodi winemakers’ needs. The winemakers in Lodi are loyal to certain coopers, but they don’t use just one exclusively.

“We’re constantly experimenting with new coopers,” Burns said.

Murphy said Peirano is currently experimenting with Hungarian and Japanese woods, and American wood crafted by French coopers.

“There’s a learning curve involved in it (barrel aging). You have to write down everything you do,” Lucas said.

The proof is in the tasting.

“It’s pretty dramatic,” said Don Litchfield, winemaker at Olde Lockeford Winery about the difference between the various woods.

A recent taste test in the Lucas Winery grand chai room (barrel storage) proved that statement.

Five wines were compared. Three were from the same vintage, but aged in different barrels: Neutral, French and American. The fourth was aged in American but from the Lucas Nova Zin variety, and the fifth was from a bottle of 1998 Lucas Zinfandel.

Lucas siphoned the first four wines from barrels (these wines were not ready for bottling, but still in aging process) and corked the fifth. From wine glasses, the taste test revealed what the winemakers know: Oak barrel aging is a powerful tool for making wine and manipulating desired flavors.