Oak

Published on: October 13, 2002

by Dennis Manuel

Oak is hugely important in the world of wine.

Oak can enhance the flavors in wine of butterscotch (typical in Chardonnay), vanilla, toffee, coffee, cloves, spices, smoke & char, coconut...and you get the point. It stabilizes the color in red wine. It adds structure to mouth feel. Use of oak barrels (as opposed to oak barrel alternatives, which I will explain) provides wine with just the proper amount of oxygen, and it softens the tannins. And that's the just the beginning of what it does.

So oak, to say the least, is hugely important to wine.

There was a time not so long ago when only the best wines spent time in oak. By the mid 1980s the use of new oak in inexpensive wine was taking hold, and wine drinkers around the world were assuming they would get the heady aromas and characteristics only oak can impart to a wine, even with the less expensive wines.

But new oak costs. An American oak barrel costs about $300-$330. You can get them for less, as low as $240, but there are a lot of factors involved, such as how long the oak is seasoned, and how it is seasoned. Oak staves should be properly seasoned for three years before they are used for barrels or cubes, sometimes referred to as beans. French oak barrels cost about double that, i.e., around $600 per barrel. A barrel of wine holds approximately 300 bottles of wine, so the additional cost of oak barrels is $1 to $2 per bottle of wine.

This cost can be lessoned over time. A winery might use a barrel for three of four years, and put 20% of a wine in new oak, 20% in one year old oak, etc., and then blend the wine to create the finished product. Using all new oak can destroy the natural characteristics of the wine, and create an overly oaked wine. The use of new oak must be judicious.

Even though all new oak is not used, thereby lessening the cost, the maintenance of oak barrels is about $50-$60 a year per barrel, old or new. Another cost.

Then there are the alternatives, which are oak staves, oak chips, and oak cubes (beans). The oak stave method is done by cleaning out the old oak barrel, and lining it with new oak staves. Depending on what type of oak is used, American or French or Hungarian (Not that common), the cost per barrel can be from $50 - $100.

The use of oak cubes (beans) which are approximately 3/8" cubed, and are fire toasted just like the staves, cuts the cost to about $30 per barrel, i.e. stainless steel barrel. The cubes are put in the stainless steel barrel like a tea bag and left to soak in the wine for however long the winemaker chooses.

There is also the use of oak chips, which is an inferior product to cubes and staves, but it is nonetheless used to cut costs. Who uses it and when is not always known, although some tasters can taste the use of chips immediately, because chips leave a bitterness or harshness that cubes, staves, and barrels do not. Chips are often used in bulk wine to add color and structure only.

Just to clear something up. American oak is not inferior to French oak, just different. It costs less because it is a different type of oak, and when cutting it into staves there is less waste.

There is, ironically, a French company, Tonnellerie Lafitte which is located in Cognac, France that makes American oak barrels. It gets its oak from Missouiri, ships it to France, toasts it to perfection, and then ships it back out to both American winemakers and French winemakers. They also work with Hungarian oak, but with an annual production of 24,500 oak barrels, only 900 of them are Hungarian.

There are companies today whose primary function is to turn stainless steel barrels into oak barrels. They line the inside of the barrels with fire toasted oak staves to give the wine the exact amount of surface exposure to the oak staves that the wine would get if it were in a new oak barrel (residue builds up in old oak barrels, preventing full oak exposure), and they add the precise amount of oxygen, so they can get a fruit forward wine framed elegantly with three year seasoned fire toasted oak. Their goal is to turn tanks into barrels.

Why?

Because without the marriage of wine and oak, we would be living in a very different wine world.

So the next time you sip a glass of wine, give a toast to a nearby oak.

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