Toasting is another factor that goes into choosing a barrel. A barrel maker builds a small fire within the barrel to toast the inside imparting a specific flavor character. A winemaker can order barrels made with different degrees of “toast”. Oak barrels are expensive and risky to use. A French oak barrel costs about $800 vs. $400 for an American oak. Many of California’s larger premium wineries can use over 25,000 small oak barrels in the aging of its wines. Because they are rough-surfaced and porous, barrels provide many niches in which

Happy Tasting!
Brian

Nothing is more impressive than walking into the barrel room of a winery and being surrounded by row upon row of stacked wine barrels. Once you have experienced this awesome sight, as I have on many occasions, it is one of the most vivid images that comes to mind when thinking of a traditional winery.

For many of these Old and New world wineries, oak barrels are the only option they would consider when aging wine. When wine matures in oak barrels three things happen: alcohol and water evaporate through the sides of the container concentrating the wine, some oxygen dissolves in the wine, allowing oxygen-dependent maturation reactions to occur slowly, and substances from the wood are extracted into the wine. The extracted substances include color, odor, flavor components, and tannins. When winemakers age wines in oak they take advantage of all three changes that occur and are particularly concerned with the flavors being added to the wine. Oak has become the traditional wood for aging premium wines because the oak tree is large enough to make wine containers of useful sizes, the wood is tight-grained, strong, and resilient and can be worked into the curved shapes needed for barrels, and the oak flavors extracted are very desirable in finished wines.

Before wood aging a wine, winemakers make several decisions to ensure that the kind and quantity of oak character added to the wine will be compatible and well-balanced with the wine’s characteristic varietal odors and flavors. Some of these decisions are made during the process of building the barrels. The first choice being the type of cooperage or wood that will be used either oak trees from the central U.S.A. or European, mostly French wood. Winemakers usually prefer oak coming from regions that have slower growing trees because they produce denser wood, which in turn slowly imparts more flavor into the wine.

Wine stored in American oak barrels will extract a vanilla or whiskey-like flavor, which is more concentrated than the European oak barrels. The vast majority of wine aging is done in French oak or in mixtures of French and American oak because the flavors of most wines cannot balance the stronger and more concentrated American oak. In regard to the size of a barrel, most winemakers prefer a sixty-gallon container that allows the desired organoleptic changes to occur in a reasonable amount of time. All of the desirable changes that result from wood aging happen where the wine meets the surface of the barrel. If the barrel is larger than 60 gallons, the smaller its surface area relative to its volume which means there is a smaller percentage of wine that can be at the surface “where the action is.”