Ridge uses air-dried oak. Does that mean no toasting? Or simply that the wood was aged before the cooper got ahold of it?
Mel can correct me, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true since the alcohol in wine will extract some things from the oak that water won’t, or won’t as fully.
I’m actually quite curious about how water and ethanol extract differently. My admittedly anecdotal experience suggests high alcohol wines seem to extract more from the oak. Perhaps ethanol as a solvent can carry more of the oak extract than water. Change the balance from 13% ethanol, 87% water to 16% ethanol, 84% water and perhaps you get more oaky wine for the same barrels.
Who knows, maybe that’s wrong. But I tend to find French wines made with plenty of new oak carry it more gracefully than new world wines. Alcohol is one (of many) differences here.
The easy question first:
Ridge buys a lot of American oak barrels from Canton cooperage, which is owned by the same people who own Taransaud, which I sell. Paul Draper has always believed in air dried American oak. Canton makes American oak barrels with the same air drying techniques Taransaud does. demptos also has some excellent American oak barrels. BOTH OF THESE COOPERAGES TOAST THE BARRELS.
You can remove bitterness from the wood by air drying the wood 12 months for every 10 mm of stave thickness or hope for the best by toasting the bejesus out of the barrel. In the short run this works as it takes around six months for the wine to get through the toast to the raw wood.
Untoasted oak: I do have customers who ask for this. If one is going to do this, the wood should be well seasoned.
Rarely does anybody ask for it twice.
My French -oriented customers ask for medium or light toast.
Does alcohol impact oak extraction? Yes, and it should be remembered that as sugars go up, so does pH.
Does the extraction of oak go up exponentially?? I think so, but research is inconclusive. It does seem that more stuff is extracted faster, but that over the long haul things even out.
Very little research has been done in this field. Also, there is not much research into what happens to wood as it dries.
The cooperages like to talk about grain width and toasting. These are easy subjects for somebody who has to finish a master’s thesis in two years. Planning a study on air drying would slow down the graduation rate.
Unoaked are being made all over the world, even in the US. Whether they sell or not is another discussion, as is the fact that tasters can perceive oak flavors in unoaked wines (because they can e.g. be confused with reduction notes, etc.)
Lots of wines are made without oak. Even I am a co-conspirator in such a project.
Does anyone know anything about the history of using the char as a flavor element, etc…in modern winemaking? when it was first used as such? where? who? how it evolved?
Obvioiusly, barrels, per se, have been used for ages for storage, breathing, etc… but it’s evolution as a flavor element I know nothing about. Anyone?
This notion of using char or toast (char is what they do for Bourbon barrels…they set the barrel on fire for a minute or so) for flavor
dates back to the mid 70s, when Mondavi discovered the difference the different ways of shaping the barrels made on the wine.
Some day I ll write an essay on the subject but not today.
Tomorrow then! ![[thankyou.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/d/df165fe9c1593d19166ae7e1ffe5e272089cc07b.gif "thankyou"){kind=small}
Interesting, Mel…so…the practice came from the US to France…you think?
And, I wonder where in France it hit first? I always assumed that guys like Henri Jayer used “toast” as a tool way earlier…but…he didn’t really hit the radar until the mid-late '70s, though he was making wine since just after the WAR.
I ll ask Martine about Henri. These barrel discoveries are a little bit like the question of who discovered America?? Perhaps the Vikings or the Basques got here before Columbus but he was the first to share the news.
I have some pictures of Jayer barrels being made in 1981…pitch black…what was he thinking?? I never asked him, but I always found it interesting that he told people he bought medium toast!
Sometime in the mid 70s Mondavi ordered barrels to be made without blisters on the inside so Demptos made barrels using steam.
Then the winemakers realized that a certain flavor was missing. When Becky Wasserman showed uop at the door with an order form for Francois Freres barrels they got further along in their quest for knowledge.
In the 70s there was not much writtten literature about barrels. There were some studies by Vern Singleton and some articles by Dick Graf and Andre Tchelischeff. Mostly people thought about forest origins…Limousin vs Nevers.
What did the Burgundians know and when did they know it?? Hard to say. But we have to give the folks at Mondavi credit for figuring out something that perhaps the French took for granted
Yes, I’ve had some baffling visits to wineries in Burgundy which put certain in Allier, certain cuvees in Vosges, certain in Nevers, Limousin…etc. etc…talk about micromanaging…I guess micro-barreling.