Classic Wines

The Importance of Oaking in White Wine

In this column, I'm going to discuss spice in white wines. White wine, with a few exceptions, develops spicy aromas and flavors as a result with it's aging in oak barrels. Oak barrels are a fascinating subject and understanding them is crucial to understanding red and white winemaking, but it's easiest to spot in white wines. Spice can be divided into two main categories - sweet and savory. Sweet spices include vanilla, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon, while savory spices include black or white pepper and liquorice.

First let's discuss the oak barrels a bit. Barrels have been used to store wine for a very long time. Cooperage, the process of making barrels, involves heating the wood to get it to bend into the barrel shape. The barrels are also often slightly burned on the inside, which toasts them. This heating and toasting process releases natural flavors from the oak, which will be imparted into the wine. The amount and kind of flavor released depends on several factors: how toasted the barrels are, the type of oak used, the thickness of the grains of the wood used, and the amount of time the wine spends in the barrels. French winemakers, for example, tend to let their white wines age for less time in the barrel than Californian ones. They also generally prefer to use oak that has a tighter grain, which prevents as many flavors from being released into the wine. Thus they end up with a milder expression of oak in their white wines.

The two primary sources for oak barrels today are made from wood found in France and America, with French oak being the predominant source used in most places. French oak is known to impart flavors of vanilla and sweet spices like nutmeg or cinnamon, while American oak tends more towards coconut and dill. While I've talked before about how lots of tastes and aromas in wine are subjective, the vanilla in French oak is actually not subjective at all. It comes from vanillin, which is the chemical you find in the fake vanilla stuff you put in your chocolate chip cookie dough. Both American and French barrels can also impart smoky flavors to the wine.

If you want to see for yourself what all this oak business is about, it's pretty easy to set up a comparison. These days generally all Chardonnays made in Napa and Sonoma receive some form of oak ageing. If you can find Sebastiani, Trefethen, or Ramey, those are sure bets for wine that will have received a great deal of oak treatment. If you can't find those, just ask your wine shop worker for any oaky California Chardonnay. Then, for comparison, look for a Chablis White wine from France. Let me make it clear that this is not the Chablis sold in large jugs you see in package stores across this country. Chablis is a sub-region of burgundy in France, and is the purest expression of the Chardonnay grape you will ever see, as they almost always use no oak barrels whatsoever. Taste the two together and you can see if you like oak or not. If you don't like the California style though, don't give up on oak entirely. You'll still want to try a Chardonnay from the Macon, another region in Burgundy. When the French use oak, as with all of their winemaking, they are much more subtle about things, and some people prefer the milder expression of oak.

When you taste these two wines, see if you pick up the spicy notes of vanilla and nutmeg in the California wine. Do you get any smokiness there also? And do you notice the clean crisp flavor in the French wine? Note that it would be very unusual for you to see any coconut or dill in a California white wine, as they almost exclusively use French oak, not American.

As I mentioned, spice almost always comes from oak in white wines. The exception to this rule is a grape called Gewurtztraminer. Say what you say? It's pronounced like this: Geh-VURTZ-trah-meener. Traminer is a town in Italy that is said to be the home of this grape, and gewurtz means spice in German. They named it after spice because it has a pungent, in your face taste, that, incidentally pairs very well with any kind of spicy food. Apart from gewurtztraminer however, if you taste any spice in a white wine, you can be pretty sure it comes from oak.

The thing about oak barrels is that they are very expensive to use. And they pretty much only work once, if you want to add flavor to the wine. The estimate is that using an oak barrel adds about three dollars of cost for the winemaker per bottle. So if find you don't like the taste of oak, count yourself lucky, as your wine will be a lot cheaper! But truthfully, if you like wine, it's impossible to completely dislike oak. While I'm working in the store, I hear a lot of people say that they don't like oak. But I think that's just because they've only had very oaky California chardonnays. As with everything in wine, try to keep an open mind if you try something you don't like, because it's very likely you could try the same grape from even the same area of the world, and end up totally liking it.

Now that I've filled you in on fruit, minerality, and spice in white wines, you're pretty well versed to try lots of wines and rank them according to your preference. Every wine you try will fall somewhere on the continuum of each of those three categories, and there is an unlimited combination of styles among those three criteria. That's the amazing thing about wine - they are all so unique! Have fun exploring it, that's what it's all about. Stay tuned for the next column, in which I'll start to delve into fruitiness in red wines.