turmoil for today’s winemakers. Let me start the ball rolling by asking flat-out a very loaded question: If presenting authentic flavors of origin is our primary goal, what, if anything, is the proper role of oak in postmodern winemaking?
A growing number of Natural Wine advocates have a simple answer: Oak has no such role. But these purists include few actual winemakers. My favorite corollary of Murphy’s law states that nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself. Indeed, when it comes time to actually do the job, ultratraditionalist Georgian winemakers fermenting their wines in buried clay vessels called qvevris often resort to wood to perfect their big reds. Even their legendary Friuli disciple, Josko Gravner, comes out of qvevri with his amazing whites and ages them for an additional six years in large neutral oak.
Even U.S. federal regulations, which are no treasure trove of winemaking wisdom and guidance, distinguish wine from beer and other beverages through the basic principle that wine has no ingredients—oak flavor being one legal exception. Barrels got grandfathered in as a container long before anybody paid attention to their role as a flavor source, and oak alternatives rode those coat tails.
Is this bald-faced hypocrisy, or the triumph of real human aesthetics over simplistic dogma? In Ernest Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia, when Northern California and the Pacific Northwest secede from the Union, the new republic legalizes only local produce. Except for coffee. Who can imagine Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco absent their morning cup?
The great Thierry Lemaire of Oenodev taught me that oak is like cosmetics for wine. “When it is used properly,” he said, “you can’t tell she’s wearing any.” Jim Concannon likens oak to garlic in cooking: at best, it’s invisible, lifting out flavors. “Of course,” he adds, “some people just like to be hit over the head with it.” If the winemaker’s role is to present the grape’s natural features, oak is a tool for making those features more presentable.
A purist might say that a self-respecting woman should wear no makeup. But in practice, most people prefer to look their best. Likewise, wine has to please its customers, and few brands will sacrifice fiscal viability for philosophical purity. Nor is unbalanced wine forgiven by anyone because of its purism.
“I first broached the idea of a postmodern Barolo with Giuseppe Vajra of the G.D. Vajra Winery in Vergne on the outskirts of the village of Barolo,” says Henry Davar in the December 2011 issue of Wines and Spirits magazine, describing how Vajra had grown up in the middle of a war, a polarized modern versus classic debate, while his father sought a middle approach. “Compared to the winemakers of the 1970s and 1980s—the decades of the Barolo Boys, new barriques, and the rotofermenter—many of today’s younger winemakers exhibit more sensitivity to the potential of the grapes, the nature of the vintage, and the personality of the cru.” Davar goes on to explain that today the two factions are merging, borrowing from each other’s tool kits and aesthetics.
Randall Grahm likes to talk about vins d’effort and vins de terroir, essentially wines that show their processing versus those that highlight natural aspects. There is a place for oak in the latter but as a supporting actor or even an extra with no lines. Oak isn’t the enemy of terroir per se, any more than any other particular tool. But inept, clumsy winemaking certainly is. Over-oaked wine is just bad cooking.
Oak’s proper use is to correct imperfections so the real wine can emerge. Any defense attorney makes sure the defendant is neatly groomed and attired before appearing before a jury. This isn’t a charade; it’s a convention that allows judgment of the real person rather than the unkempt trappings.
Complete wines do not need oak extractives. In 1986, I visited J.L. Chave just after his Hermitage had received 100 points from Robert Parker and asked him which coopers he used. “I honestly don’t remember,” he told me as we rooted through his cellar looking for markings. “My grandfather bought all these barrels.” Big, dense wines like Chave’s don’t need the wood extractives new barrels provide, but they do crave the barrel’s other features, and benefit greatly from time in old barrels, to out-gas off-odors and facilitate slow oxidative development. Barrels also create both oxidative zones above and reductive zones below, intermixing their reaction products.
It pays to consider what deficiencies a particular wine may possess in order to choose the right oak to supplement them. Wines like Pinot Noirs are likely to flag at their task of surviving a year or better of age, and benefit from substantial help in the form of oak antioxidants, color stabilizers, sweetness, and mouthfeel contributors.
Oak is not the only way to help a deficient wine. The aromatic contributions of complex indigenous yeast/bacteria fermentations are just another method, in no way philosophically superior, to introduce artificial supplements in character, complexity, and mouthfeel that the grapes themselves do not contain.
DISSECTING OAK’S FUNCTIONS
It is said that the Eskimos don’t have a word for snow. Hey, up there, it’s all snow. Instead they need dozens of distinctions for different kinds of snow, ranging from powder to slush to ice. In the same way, oak is not a useful term for winemakers. The postmodern approach identifies seven broad distinctions in oak extractives.
Novice winemakers look at wood first and foremost as a flavoring agent. This is a mistake. Oak has five primary functions that must be addressed before its aromatics can have any relevance.
1. Coextraction
As discussed in chapter 2, red wine is a lot like chocolate, containing tiny phenolic beads that contain tannin, color, and flavor. When we ferment crushed grapes on their skins, it is challenging to extract the anthocyanin pigments, which are not soluble in aqueous solution. Since anthocyanins are positively charged, they repel each other and won’t aggregate into colloids. They can only be extracted if they are interspersed with uncharged phenolic cofactors, like a giant club sandwich.
Untoasted oak is a rich source of hydrolyzable tannins called ellagitannins, which break down in must to yield prodigious quantities of gallic acid, a powerful cofactor. Toasted wood does not enhance color extraction. The toasting process oxidatively polymerizes these small molecules into large chains that will not assist anthocyanins in forming colloids. Worse, the barbecue aromas of toasted wood are amplified by yeast action to produce a strong Worcestershire sauce aroma.
Green untoasted wood contains trans-2-nonenol, a nasty, planky sawdust aroma that persists in wine for years. To prevent this, oak needs curing outside in weather that will leach tannins and foster subtle microbial transformations. Curing wood is an art, and skill is required to avoid the formation of TCA, the corky aroma. Thus only highly reputable coopers should be entrusted with the production of untoasted chips or barrel heads.
2. Antioxidative Power
A common deficiency in musts is reductive strength, without which structural integrity, good texture, and graceful longevity are not possible. Besides its coextraction properties, gallic acid is also a wonderful antioxidant. As a vicinal triphenol (see chapter 6), it imparts supplemental reductive vigor to weak wines that are poorly concentrated or that have lost their energy to field oxidation during excessive hang time. In oxygen’s absence, ellagitannins will lend a harsh crudeness, but proper exposure to oxygen will transform this to a fat, round texture. Oak plays a particularly important supporting role in Pinot Noirs, which often cannot support the extensive aging required to elaborate their flavors without supplemental antioxidative power.
3. Sweetness
As a general rule, the desired palate architecture for red wines is a sweet core of fruit contained by an angular frame of tannin. Some wines start off with excellent fruit core but lack definition—this is typically true of Barbera, Grenache, and some Merlots. Others have the frame but not the fruit, a common problem in Mourvèdre,
