Fashions in the wine business change over time, with the latest phenomenon being a lessening of the use of 100% new oak barrels for the production of fine wines. Twenty years back, the trend was for all new oak both in white and red wines, which meant they often had a rather smoky/caramel flavour for the reds and a buttery vanilla style with the whites, especially Chardonnay or White Burgundy. Some cheaper wine producers even stirred in oak chips into wine while it was fermenting but that practice has been outlawed for the grander wines of Bordeaux. Chateau Giscours, an eminent Margaux, was caught adding oak chips to its lesser wines and was heavily fined, leading one regulatory official to quip “In Bordeax we put wine into wood, not wood into wine”.
Stephen Browett, the Chairman of Farr Vintners, which are the largest fine wine brokers in the world, believes there has been a dramatic swing away from the heavy use of oak. “I would say that the fashion is certainly away from over oaked and high alcohol wine as well.
Barrels at Chateau de Beaucastel
Obviously in the past there some consumers thought the richer and the oakier the better but now people are turning towards wines that are more classically structured, more mineral and focussed. The main victims have been the big oaky and alcoholic wines from Australia and the so-called garagist wines from Bordeaux as the one thing they both had in common was being over-oaked. Fortunately, wine-makers in Victoria have responded by producing far more nuanced wine with greater terroir elements, so that some producers like Bindi are creating Chardonnays which have Chablis-like characteristics.
Jean-Guillaume Prats, the general manager of Chateau Cos d’Estournel, one of the leading “Super Second” Bordeaux, believes “the key factor is that now the consumer doesn’t want to feel or smell the oak, which was not the case in the Eighties and Nineties. Secondly, the wines today are more tannic and have more alcohol than 15 to 20 years ago, so they tend to need longer ageing, so you need a much better quality of oak as well. Finally, the extraordinary level of prosperity that Bordeaux has experienced in the past two decades has allowed the chateaux to really invest in high quality barrels and the manufacturers and coopers have followed that trend. It is very likely that until now we have never experienced this level of quality with oak, including the drying and selecting of oaks and the coopers. We now use around 80% new oak whereas previously with tannic vintages like ‘95 or ‘96 we would use more than 90%. But I must say that everyone at the top level in Bordeaux has reduced their amount of new oak.
New oak barrels cost several hundred pounds each so it is also a major expensive to only use new ones. Certain renowned Chateaux in France manage to sell off their old barrels to lesser producers, who still gain from the lustre of using a famous name barrel in their vineyard.
Aubert de Villaine tasting the 07s out of barrel
The grandest wine of all, Burgundy’s Domaine Romanée Conti, have always used virtually 100% new oak for all of their wines. Aubert de Villaine, the co-owner and Director of the Domaine, takes enormous care to only use finely-grained oak, which their barrel maker personally selects. They purchase from three or four forests and actually age the oak for a further four years in the open to get it weathered. When a barrel of their wine could be worth upwards of hundreds of thousands of pounds, it is understandable that they take infinite care in the selection process. Speaking at the recent London tasting of their superlative 2009 vintage, Mr Villaine said “We have experimented quite a lot but when you have such strong yields as we have in our vineyards, it is better for them to use around 95% New Oak, except for our recently released wine from Corton, which is better with 50% new oak. For our wines it bring a final touch, which doesn’t actually show on the palate. New oak breathes better which is good for the wine as well and it is better for the tannins. For me, it is like putting someone into a bed with fresh sheets.”
This piece appears in the latest Bonhams magazine (Spring 2012)