How Do You Want Your Barrel?

It's an important decision for a winemaker -- how do you want your barrel? Sessile oak, pedunculate oak, white oak? New, once used, twice used (neutral), more than twice used (far less expensive)? Light toast, medium toast, heavy toast? If it was used previously, what was it used for? All done by natural processes or perhaps less expensively using an expedited process? Or, do I want oak at all?

So many questions. So many choices. It's a bit like ordeing hah browns at Waffle House. Do you want them scattered and smothered? Or perhaps peppered? Or capped? But Waffle House hash browns are what they are. We, after all, are talking about wine and here, the choices are not to be considered with levity This, after all, is life or death. At least, it might be life or death of someone's taste buds for the night.

Let's start with the choice of barrels or not. Should we use an oak barrel or some other veesel and why or why not? 

Technically, it's not the barrels that impart flavor to wine. It's the the low-level oxidation that extracts elements from the barrels to impart flavor. But, that is really technical. Wine in a new new oak barrel (225 liter) typically receives about 30 milligrams of dissolved oxygen per liter per year. This has a number of positive effects: improving color, softening tannins, and building the backbone or structure of a wine.That said, some grapes don't like oak and despite these positive effects, the negative outweighs the positive and they are best fermented elsewhere.

Do you like vanilla in your wine? Vanilla flavor comes from vanillin. Toasting of a barrel increases vanillin up to a point, but if you overtoast, the vanillin dissipates. Frankly, this may be more of an issue in bourbon barrels than wine. But, if you try one of these bourbon-barrel wines that are all the rage today, the toast might be heavy enough that the wine is smoky, but has lost all positive wine effects.

Similarly, some people love tannins in wine. Others do not. The more you toast a barrel, the lower the concentration of ellagitannins (oak tannins). Those tannins are absorbed by the must and become part of the wine. As we learned a couple of nonths ago, tannins tend to increase ageworthiness and at least among collectors, ageworthiness is considered good. So, again, heavily toasted barrels are more likely to produce wines that you must drink young.

Finally, and we could go on, there is the issue of how many times previously should the barrel have been used. How much do you want the effect of the barrel on the wine? New barrels have more effects. They are also more expensive. Previously used barrels carry with them the positives and negatives of what has been in them previously. That includes, for example, brettanomyces, or Brett, the chemical that gives wine a wet dog aroma. If the wine that was in the barrel the last time it was used had Brett, a lot of it is still there and your new wine is also likely to have Brett.

So many decisions. And those decisions could be the difference between a bad wine and a decent one, a decent one and a good one, a good one and a great one, or a great wine and a life-changing one.