Summer 2018 Barrels: What They Contribute to Beer, Wine and Liquor - Part 1 Comprehensive Tasting of Wine Double Gold Tasting Notes from the 2018 Tasters Guild International Wine Judging The Mystery of Foam in the Kitchen Retailer‛s Shelf The Beauty of Carménère Those Mystical Moments Ask Tasters Guild Barrels: What They Contribute to The Advent of Barrels for Wine Beer, Wine and Liquor- Part 1 Although the Bourbon whiskey business quickly made charred barrel maturation its signature process, aging By A. Brian Cain wine in new and flavorful barrels really didn’t make much headway until the 1960’s and 1970’s. Certainly barrels Legend has it that Elijah Craig, a preacher and moon- have been used to store wine for many centuries, but, shiner, was bending barrel staves by the traditional winemakers used the same barrels every year and didn’t method of the day with fire. Right in the middle of retire them until they started to leak which may take as bending the staves and assembling a barrel he got called long as a hundred years. Once a barrel has been used for away in an emergency for a dying parishioner. When he maybe 4 or 5 years, it no longer imparts an oak flavor into returned to his barrel, it had become quite charred with the wine though it still retains some residual flavors from the interior looking like black alligator skin. Being a frugal previous batches and importantly is a breeding ground for man of limited means, instead of using the scorched bar- a menagerie of micro-organisms that can favorably affect rel for firewood, he filled it with white lightning. After a the flavor and structure of the wine. Wineries, of course, few years, the whiskey did add new barrels had turned brown and as old ones started to had the most magnifi- leak or as production cent aroma and flavor increased, but, they ever conceived in the were very careful to history of moonshine. very gradually add only Thus, was the birth of a few new ones per Bourbon whiskey. year so that the oak flavors of those new Whether there is any barrels wouldn’t be historical truth in this detected in the final tale or not, up until a overall blend of new little more than a few and mostly old neutral centuries ago, barrels barrels. were simply a conve- nient storage vessel In the 1960’s and while wine and whiskey 1970’s, the California makers had little ap- and Australian wine preciation for the changes in flavor that liquors or wines business exploded and grew exponentially. It was no underwent while in those barrels. To make a beverage longer possible to bury a few new barrels amongst a taste like wood was unheard of. vast stand of used ones. As wineries literally doubled or tripled their production annually, a large percentage if As recently as the early 1980’s a reporter was interview- not a majority of their barrels were new. To calm down ing the winemaker at a classified Bordeaux and remarked the overt woodiness, toasting the barrels just below that that he was surprised that the winery did not own a single of a bourbon barrel not only seemed to make the wood barrel and that all of the wine was stored and aged in taste more palatable to the winemakers, but, the con- enamel lined concrete tanks. The winemaker quickly sumers loved it! In those days, many wines from the assured the reporter that there was no need to put the US and Australia tasted more like Bourbon than they did wine in barrels because the same result could be achieved like traditional wines. After a few decades of enormous more precisely by simply pumping the wine through the growth, production came back to a level where winemak- air and allowing it to splash around. The winemaker was ers could add maybe 5-10% new barrels every year and referring to the process of micro-oxygenation that a barrel restore the taste of their wines to what they believed it provides over a significant length of time. It never even should be. Consumers, however, had become used to the occurred to him that anyone in his right mind would actu- overt sweet, sappy, caramel, chocolate and coffee-like oak ally want their wine to taste like an oak barrel. flavors and complained that winemakers had wimped out. 2 SPRING/SUMMER 2018 TASTERS GUILD JOURNAL easy to over oak Chardonnay even in a few months, and it Barrel Wood Treatment seemed almost impossible to over oak big reds even after a year in barrel, I still had the mistaken opinion that toasted barrels had All barrels used to be air dried. About 50 years ago, it was dis- more flavor than medium toast barrels. In fact, the reality is covered that kiln dried barrels intended for Bourbon aging were just the opposite. Even after several visits to the cooperage and just as good and much cheaper. It takes years and acres of land dozens of barrel replacements over decades at our own winery, to air dry barrel staves. Imagine what a million barrels looks like I still believed that heavy toast had more oak taste than medium and imagine three times that much wood staves stacked outside. or light toast. It is literally a forest of wood stacks stretching out for maybe a half mile square. Because Bourbon makers want the flavor of Fortunately, a blind pig does occasionally find an acorn. Be- the toast and do not necessarily want the flavor of the wood it- cause I switched to making red wine exclusively, my misinforma- self they found that barrels made with kiln dried lumber worked tion about barrel toast served me well and my wines continued just fine and cost about 30% less. to improve as I increased the amount of toast and even started immersing heavily toasted “beans” into the barrels as well. In Scotland used to buy millions of used Bourbon barrels because, the spring 2017 issue of the American Wine Society Journal, once most of the toast flavor was leached out by the Bourbon, Kristine Austin discusses the influence of toasting oak on the the resulting barrel afforded just the right wood flavor to en- resulting wine. I was in disbelief when she stated that the less hance the already smoky peaty flavor of Scots Whisky. So, once the toast the stronger the oak flavor and the heavier the toast the Bourbon industry stopped using air dried barrels, the Scot- the milder the oak flavor. tish distilleries had to find a new source of barrels. Today, the Scots distillers source air dried barrels from wineries and have Having made wine for over thirty years, that fact went against invested a fortune in seasoning their own barrels by using them everything I thought I knew. So, my friends Tom and Kim LeRoux first for inexpensive blended Scotch and then using the seasoned of Vineyard LeRoux cut some old staves I had laying around into barrels for their single malts and finer longer aged blends. dice-sized beans and toasted them at vary- ing degrees from very light to very heavy toast. They then put them in quart jars full of a 2015 Marquette that had already been aged in a brand new heavy toast Missouri White Oak air dried barrel. After a few weeks, to our amazement, we discovered that Kristine Austin was correct. The jar with the lightly toasted beans was over- whelmingly oaky (tasted like wood) and that with the heavily toasted beans, didn’t taste much different than the wine straight out of the barrel. So, really, by accident I was right, sort of. Lightly toasted oak imparts a strong flavor of caramel, butter, toffee and tree sap. Heavily toasted oak imparts a tamer flavor of vanilla, smoke, coffee and chocolate. Hence, for the flavors I sought for red wines, I accidentally got a lot more out of the heavily toasted barrels and avoided the flavors that really didn’t improve the flavor of red wine. 3 SPRING/SUMMER 2018 TASTERS GUILD JOURNAL Comprehensive Tasting of Wine detrimental. This was proven decades ago by an analysis conducted at the California State fair wine judging.) By Dan Berger Were the wines all judged on the same exact day? When you see an issue of a wine magazine that has If so, problems could exist since those wines tasted reviews for 347 German Rieslings or 411 Bordeaux, or early in the day with fresh palates might get a fairer anything similar, the implication is that the tasting was judging. If not, problems could exist anyway since wines comprehensive. tasted the second day or even later were done by people But when you see that a gigantic number of wines were with different palates–even if they were the same people! reviewed, do you analyze what that means in logistical (We do not always taste the same day to day.) terms? In fact, tasting 347 I doubt anyone does. German Rieslings We usually take it on (to use our earlier some form of faith that example) in a single the reviews all relate day calls for so many to a single standard. radical changes in Which is never defined. approach that tastings Not to mention the done in the morning fact that such a vast cannot relate to those number sounds as done late in the day. if all the wines were Just the mental judged by the same fatigue alone (one judging standards, and grape variety done that virtually all of the over and over again) wines of that type were leads to a blurring judged.