The Second Glass

Disclaimer: This is the first blog I wrote notes for at work, in-between troubleshooting a half-working grape crusher and being splashed with zinfandel juice…

So yesterday I was doing some barrel work, and while climbing on barrels all I could think about was how I hadn’t posted anything for this week yet, and worse off, I was thinking about how I couldn’t think about anything to write. Then it hit me (specifically a splash of Chardonnay in the face…) I haven’t talked about barrels yet. So here’s the skivvy on oak barrels at Chappellet.

We use French, American and Hungarian oak barrels, all of which are toasted wood that has aged for at least 3 years. It would be easy to write a short novel on the varieties of barrels you can buy, but I’ve got better things to do than put you all to sleep. The most common barrel we use is a medium toast either with or without toasted heads (heads being the flat parts on either side of the barrel). A barrel uses about 1/2 of its “oaking potential” after one year, about 1/3 less the next year, and so on, giving the average barrel a useful shelf-life of about four vintages. After four years the barrel may not be useful for giving oak flavor, but it is still a handy place to store wine for two more years. After six years, its time to become some sort of second hand craft that people LOVE to put everywhere in Napa…

The best way to think of oak is as the spice that is added to wine. Like a well stocked spice rack, a variety of barrel types give you many different flavors you can add to your wine. Here’s the fun part, every year Chappellet does some trials with different coopers, toast levels, specific forests, and all of they other crazy variations you can find. And at some point after harvest we’re going to have a tasting with the 20ish different types of barrels they are in the process of doing trials with for the ‘06 vintage (which I am super psyched about).

Now you might wonder, as I used to, its all oak…does it really make that much of a difference? And although we’ve yet to do the formal tasting, I’ve tasted lots of the same wine at work in different years, coopers, and toast levels, and there is defintiely a difference between all of them. For example, yesterday I was swapping bungs out of 100+ recently fermented Chardonnay barrels, and I smelled each bung after removing it. There was a clear difference between new oak, one year old, and two year old, and for my money year old oak is where it is at. The wine in the new oak (to me) smelled much less integrated, with a harsh wood/oak smell almost the same as sniffing an empty 2007 oak barrel. The year old barrels were well integrated, smoother with that oak aroma that is synonymous with barrel fermented Chardonnay, while the two year old barrels were very similar, but far less pronounced. I’m sure the harshness fades away after barrel aging, but I’ll tell you this much, I’m going to think twice before buying a chardonnay that proudly boasts that it is “100% barrel fermented and aged in new French oak”…