do we use staves? Americans cling to several myths.
Myth #1: Staves are split along the grain and have no exposed end grain, which in chips imparts a planky harshness. But if you look at oak under a microscope, you can see that it has lots of rays—tubes that run perpendicular to the grain. Tannins are extracted much more readily through these rays than through endgrain. That planky dryness we want to avoid arises from poor wood selection, inadequate air drying, or inconsistent toasting, not from exposed end grain.
Myth #2: Staves, like barrels, have a toast gradient that adds complexity. The reality is that the untoasted interior of a stave imparts a green pithiness at just the wrong moment, just as occurs in barrels. It would be so much better if the toast were in the interior and the green wood on the inside surface, exposed to the young wine, which can better handle it. This isn’t possible, so the best we can do is to use small chips and introduce the various toast levels in the order we desire rather than be restricted by considerations that dictate the building of a container.
Myth #3: Toast fixes color during fermentation. ’Taint so. Anthocyanins are not fixed by aldehydes unless oxygen is present, which is never the case during fermentation. If they were, the high concentration of aldehyde in fermentation would fix everything. But that doesn’t happen. What fermentation does cause is an amplification of the barbecue furfurals to the level of Worcestershire sauce. Ugh. Toasted staves contribute no copigmentation cofactors or antioxidative ellagitannins to fermentations.
Myth #4: Staves replicate the complexity of cooperage at lower cost. In reality, when the cooper builds a fire inside the barrel to make the wood pliable for bending, barrel complexity arises from the differing heat zones that result from the varied distances from the fire that surfaces lie. The traditional use of untoasted heads adds sweetness and tannin. Stave manufacture, which is done in temperature-controlled ovens, in no way resembles coopering.
The lowly chip is the perfect format for blending to achieve consistency. It allows toasting in a rotating drum (similar to coffee beans), which produces even, predictable results, allowing precisely flavored products. Unlike dust, chips retain aromatics and do not surface-adsorb wine flavors. Any degree of complexity can be achieved by blending different chip products, and these can be easily experimented with in single-bottle trials, which take about two months to resolve. Staves, conversely, share the inconsistency, inconvenience, and expense of barrels and offer no technical advantage over chips.
To be sure, there are plenty of crappy chips on the market. My advice for starting down this path is to buy only the most expensive chips you can find and get your flavor from them instead of from new barrels.
Old barrels still provide essential functions, and should be treated reverently and preserved for one’s grandchildren. It appears that there will always be enough lunkheads around who want to unload their once-used barrels at a small fraction of the cost of new. Barrel sterilization with ultrasound or microwave can alleviate even the most fastidious winemaker’s microbial paranoid fantasies, and when they lie empty between fillings with wine, storage with a water solution containing citric acid and sodium bisulfite (a heaping cup of each) is preferable to the currently trendy SO2 gassing when your goal is a fully leached barrel. Once they no longer leach out pithy green tannins, you will, like Chave, come to regard your oldest barrels as among your greatest assets.
Oaky dokie?
TAKE-HOME MESSAGES
The bigger and more complete a wine, the less oak extraction and the more time in old barrels it needs.
View your wine programs through the lens of what oak’s seven functions can supply. When it fills in deficiencies, oak becomes invisible.
Never buy another new barrel. But don’t tell anybody, because barrel producers throw really great parties, invitation only. I hope you appreciate how many convention perks this advice is costing me.
5
Vineyard Enology
The Power of Showing Up
Things should be made as simple as possible, and no simpler.
—Albert Einstein
Humans are not well equipped to look beyond the simple. In his masterpiece, The Quark and the Jaguar, Nobel laureate particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann examines the challenge of conceptualizing complex systems. It appears that one of the accomplishments of twenty-first-century science will be the development of tools for working with intricacies.
In the meantime, what we do instead is dissect complex reality into constituent parts that are easier to grasp, trying to manage the whole as the sum of the pieces. This is called reductionism. Though a poor substitute for a true grasp of the whole, reductionist rationalism often masquerades as the only legitimate form of scientific inquiry.
If we are honest with ourselves, rationalism must always be confessed a charade. When even a single atomic particle must be thought of as both a particle and a wave, and when hundreds of different dimers result from all the possible ways of linking just two identical tannin monomers, how can we hope ever to dissect the complexities that occur in a single glass of wine, let alone the natural chaos of a vineyard?
For the past half century, we have busied ourselves with the viticultural equivalent of ethnic cleansing. Our rational limitations manifest themselves in our cherished professional winegrowing practices, many of which are chosen primarily for their convenience to our way of thinking rather than to further what is best for wine, environment, or health. It is easier to conceive of and control a vineyard monoculture than a full-blown ecological system, and as soon as petrochemical pesticides and herbicides hit the market in the 1950s, many growers took to simplifying their task by eliminating every weed and bug. We then went on to abandon the practice of mixed cultivar plantings and to heat treat for viruses, further dumbing down the system.
The pursuit of orderliness is not the true face of science. Rather than conduct an inquiry into the complexities of natural balance, we bought ourselves time by changing the question from “What is the nature of a farm ecology?” to “What simplifying steps can I take to rationalize farming?” Another tactic in excluding extraneous input was to divide winegrowing into two academic disciplines: viticulture (the growing of grapes) and enology (the organized study of the making of wine).
The viticulture classes I took at UC Davis in the ’80s paid scant attention to wine grape quality. Our focus was on yields, pruning weights, acidity, and, above all, sugar (brix), all easily measured without resorting to the vagaries of aesthetics or sensory science. Often quoted in my UC Davis classes was Ray Kroc of McDonald’s: “You cannot manage what you cannot measure.” This training left viticulture graduates running commercial vineyards totally unprepared to debate quality with high-handed winemaker customers who want to drop half their crop to achieve flavor concentration.
I myself am a pitiful example of academic divide-and-conquer. In all candor, growing quality wine grapes requires all the attention a single individual can muster. You work it, breathe it, and dream it, awaking each morning with a new understanding. You can’t just phone it in. Knowing that I could never devote that much dedicated attention in my daily work, it has been my strategy to forge strong and lasting relationships with dedicated growers, and to try to hold up my end of an intense and continuous conversation about a win-win focused on quality.
Having come clean on this, I am nevertheless obliged in this book to touch on this most important of winemaking topics. Fortunately, I can in good conscience address postmodern approaches to the vineyard by introducing you to someone who’s
