Winemaking: Wine in Barrels: thick as a barrique

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Wine in Barrels: thick as a barrique

Wine barrel Not only a container, barrels are a condiment. They add to wine as well as hold it, plus establish an environment for aging that is hard to duplicate. Chehalem uses almost exclusively French oak barrels for fermenting and/or aging its wines. Everything in the cellar, with the exception of one of our two Pinot gris and our Riesling, sees time in barrel. And they seem to like it. Of course, our accountant doesn't, since we almost reach six digits to pay for oak each year. Is it an affectation, a PR photogenic nicety, or really worthwhile? What is our approach to its use?

All Pinot noir and Chardonnay see a mixture of new and older oak barrels. Red wines like Pinot noir age in oak, sometimes with as much as 2/3 of it new (at $600 per barrel, with 24 cases or so yielded per barrel). Whites ferment and age in oak, with some Chardonnays using 40-50% new barrels. Pinot gris Reserve and Cerise (our Gamay noir/Pinot noir blend) exclusively use older barrels, what we call "neutral" oak barrels, because they make no direct contribution to the wine flavors.

We use barrels because the vanillan, butterscotch, spice, caramel, toasty elements are attractive complements to the flavors grapes have. But that's not all, since used barrels that have lost the ability to extract these flavors still are useful. The barrel sets up a living environment because it is a semi-permeable container, allowing a "breathing" to occur without significant oxidation, respiring wine in evaporation into the atmosphere. Barrels require "topping" on a regular basis to makeup for the loss, losing as much as a couple gallons per barrel over the year of aging. The breathing adds to richness and complexity in the finished wine, as well as a roundness and suppleness.

Yeasts like the whole idea of "breathing" too. Much of the richness developed in barrel comes from yeast. Both reds and whites gain flavors, viscosity, breadth and length from "lees contact," the simple manipulation that fits my laziness well, leaving yeasts in barrel after fermentation to breakdown. Of course, as with lots of simple concepts which can be complex in application, lees contact can take many forms and can be active rather than passive. Barrels are stirred (batonage in French) at certain times and frequencies to accomplish an enrichment without getting a leesy overyeasty character, at other times to suspend the yeast in a wine to encourage a finish to fermentation. What this really gives is another opportunity for Cheryl and me as winemakers to disagree as to extent.

Lees contact has been accepted awhile for Chardonnay, but leaner wines like Pinot gris beef up with it too to become a complex wine like our Reserve. Lees contact in Pinot noir is now also a hot topic, with many winemakers trying to obtain greater texture and length embracing it in true American style-if a little is good, as much as you can get is best. We traditionally leave Pinot noir late on lees (8 to 14 months) with no stirring.

Barrels are as much an agricultural product as the grapes that go into them. The French oak we use is grown in intensely farmed national forests in different regions of that country. Forests we prefer include Allier, Troncais (a sub-forest of Allier), Nevers, Bertrange (a sub-forest of Nevers) and Vosges. The different growing conditions (rain, sunlight, soil) yield different flavors, different extraction rates of the flavors, different tannin levels, and more. We use a variety of different barrels, made in small cooperages (or tonnelleries) where minimally mechanized processes simulate an artisan's work done in the same villages for hundreds of years. Unique styles set apart coopers as much as winemaking styles set wineries apart. Of course, choosing a barrel style is one reflection of a winemaker's style.

For example, barrels are ordered with specific levels of "toast," or browning, inside the barrel. A side effect of the small pot fire that helps to bend the staves during manufacture, this browning is now an important quality parameter for winemakers, imparting flavors that differ, ranging from caramel/butterscotch in light-moderate toast to smoky, meaty, sulfidy in heavy toast. Other factors such as length of wood aging to leach out bitter and green flavors are also specified.

It is not easy to maintain a style, once you develop what you think is "you." Variability in coopers' processes can be significant. We intentionally focus on three or four coopers that we trust and whose barrels we like, specifying forest and toast and wood age barrels to our style. However, we always experiment, not only in making comparisons each year between them, but continually bringing in new coopers and playing with variables they give us.

The barrel is a simple shape, but a complex factor in winemaking.