Winemaker Wisdom: Oaking Wine

Madeline Puckette, better known as Wine Folly, recently explored the issue of oaking wine and why it is that oak makes wine taste better.

Oak is a crucial and often overlooked component of the wine world. Everything from the type, size, age, grain and treatment of an oak barrel greatly affects the finished wine.

Puckette takes a closer look at the three main types of oak trees that are used for wine oak aging, the French Oak, American Oak and Hungarian/Eastern European Oak, and provides some interesting insights on oak barrels and flavor components.  This is a topic most wine drinkers, connoisseurs included, don’t probably spend too much time on, however is a crucial element in wine-making.

As a winemaker, I find it is often a challenge to educate about barrels and what as a winemaker I am looking for when I use them. While I certainly am looking for some flavor component that will bring more complexity to the wine, my main purpose for using oak is for the depth brought on by the fact that wood breathes (micro oxygenation). These helps to round out the wines and give them some body. Also, there is the increased contact with lees to bring even greater complexity. Oak chips, oak powder and oak alternatives just don’t provide these elements and that’s why I choose to use real French oak barrels from various coopers, toasts and regions.

– Gustavo Gonzalez, Mira Winemaker

Click here to read the entire Wine Folly blog post.