20 August 2007
[Epi 12] TintoTV - oaking wine, aging sur lie, divide and conquer
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Hints of toast, vanilla, or the actual wood/oak in a nice glass of wine are usually attributed to oaking. The addition of oak to our homemade wine may appear to be level of complexity limited for commercial wine makers. Wineries ubiquitously scatter American or French oak barrels through their facilities to tactfully age and add new levels of complexity to the wine. While barrel aging can be expensive and can take up a lot of space, in this episode of Tinto TV, Stephany and I discuss a few ways and show you a method for oaking your homemade wine!
As in commercial wineries, the home winemaker has much flexibility in the methods for oaking wine. These are just a few:
- you could use a small barrel (but this can be expensive and impractical)
- add oak extract (liquid concentrate form, some times referred to as oak “essence”)
- add oak dust/powder
- add oak cubes
- add oak chips
With the exception of the barrel, all of these options are inexpensive and offer you the winemaker, a variety of options. In our episode above, we chose to use French medium toast oak chips. In addition to French oak, other common options include American and Hungarian oak, and all of them can be found in a light, medium, or heavy toast. Here is a sample of options from the retail site I frequent: Fine Vine Wines (if you buy there, tell them TintoTV sent you!). The tweaking doesn’t end with the oaking options though. You have control over how much oak you want to add to your volume of wine and you also have control over how long you want the wine to be in contact with the oak – both are supremely important in your end product. The key is to taste along the way so you know when to rack off of the oak.
One thing worth mentioning: be sure you clean and sanitize your oak additions. This was not obvious to me, but it is crucial so that you avoid introducing spoilage bacteria into your wine. With our oak chips, we first rinsed them in hot water and then soaked them in a potassium metabisulphite solution for about 15 minutes. This should be enough to keep our wine safe. Additional preparation techniques I’ve heard include re-toasting your oak in the oven to extract even more flavor from the wood pieces. I have not tried this but I am interested in what others have done. One current “question mark” we have with the oaking is how it can affect the coloring of a wine. We’ve noticed that it has slightly discolored our strawberry wine and expect this to go away, but we are also curious about others’ experiences in this regard.
One additional technique we are using with our oaking is a sort of “divide and conquer” approach. The idea is that we treat a subpart of our wine uniquely in the spirit of experimentation so that we do not mishandle our main container of wine. When we racked the Welch’s wine from the primary, we had enough to fill a 750ml bottle. We decided to add A LOT of oak to this bottle so that the wood’s impact inundates the wine’s flavor profile, a purposeful over-oaking! Our goal here is to learn more how the oak imparts a flavor to this particular batch and, while we have over oaked this subset of the wine, when we top-off our carboy from this bottle, the overall effect will end up in a more subtle and rounder outcome! “Divide and conquer” is not limited to oaking though and certainly not limited to 750ml bottles (perhaps use a 1 gallon carboy to complement a 5 gallon carboy, or a 6 gallon carboy to complement a 55 gallon barrel, etc…). Any sort of tweaks, whether it be raisin addition, back sweetening, additional tannin, etc. can effectively be tried with a smaller portion of your batch.
One other thing we mentioned was the French term sur lie. This translates literally as “on lees” and contextually refers to leaving our wine on top of our yeasty residue (consisting mainly of dead yeast cells and fruit particles) after fermentation. While there can be a risk of off flavors when leaving your wine in contact with this sediment layer, some winemakers believe that certain wines can benefit with contact with the lees, adding freshness, creaminess, and/or roundness to the mouthfeel of the wine. Since our strawberry wine threw a huge layer of sediment (I don’t think we’ll use a blender again for crushing fruit), we thought we’d leave our wine steady sur lie for a couple of months before racking off to see if we can taste any difference in comparison with our other batches which have not had as much contact with the lees. Here is one source of information to learn about sur lie and battonage – you can also google it for more information.
OK, that was a LOT of information, but we hope it is helpful, we are still learning and want to touch on as many subjects as possible. We do need help with upcoming episodes, so please send us your questions, feedback, pictures, and even your own clips so that we can feature you on Tinto TV! If you’re too shy for a comment, feel free to email us TintoTV, otherwise, WE LOVE COMMENTS! Please share your feedback, questions, ideas, or just say hi. Thanks for watching!
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