Andrew Jefford: Where are we with wine and oak?

What’s the relationship between vineyard and forest? Does one need the other? I’m not thinking of plant communities and root-system interactions – but chainsaws biting 100-year-old trunks to create tuns, barriques, staves and chips. Where are we with wine and oak?

Raw new wine can be exciting (hence the heurige or ‘this year’ traditions of drinking milky-looking, heady new wine in Austria and Germany in autumn), but it’s more often violent, chaotic and indigestible. Most wine needs time to calm down and ‘grow up’ (as implied by the French term élevage). Where do you put it for the duration?

Sealing it in a tank is not a good idea: it needs aeration to avoid the stinkiness normally described in wine circles as ‘reduction’.

Leaving it in a half-empty vessel is no wiser: it will quickly gobble up too much oxygen and fall flat, turn acetic, or both. Clean, topped-up barrels are the classical solution, allowing discreet air-exchange without oxidative or acetic spoilage. Small, young barrels bring more flavour and oxygen-exchange than large, old tuns.

Our century began with lashings of oak. Some winemakers gave their wines ‘200% new oak’ (a new barrel to begin with, then another new barrel halfway through the ageing process); new oak was de rigueur for any ambitious wine. ‘Barrel select’, ‘vieilli en fûts de chêne’ and other local-language equivalents littered labels and helped sell bottles.

Then… disenchantment set in. Isn’t wine meant to be about terroir? Terroir is the taste of a place; oak is a winery artefact. Since 2000, oak has been in retreat, and ageing in steel, concrete, glass or fired-clay containers of various sorts, shapes and sizes has been ascendant. The avant-garde today would chortle at 200% new oak: naff or what? They prefer quiet clay.

Wait, though: this question is a deliciously complex one. I dislike ‘oakiness’. But I’ve come to realise that I also relish it. Here’s how...

I distinguish barrel fermentation from barrel ageing. Barrel fermentation is almost always a white-wine technique; it’s laborious and expensive, so is generally used for ambitious white wines from high-quality grapes.

When successful, this (for me) is the best reason to fell centenarian oaks, since it’s a three-way, multi-layered relationship (wine, yeast and wood), with complex interactions between each of the agents both during the fermentative process and afterwards. It brings richness and texture more than oak flavour; indeed its flavour legacy is more likely to be oatflake-creamy than oaky.

This truly serves terroir for certain white-wine styles – it’s impossible to imagine (for example) great white Burgundy or Sauternes attaining optimum dimensionality in any other way.

None of this is true for barrel-ageing alone. Put a new white into a new oak barrel and the wine quickly becomes ‘oaky’ – in contrast to the result if it’s been fermented in that barrel and left on its lees.

High-quality reds from certain grape varieties or locations do, by contrast, profit from small-barrel ageing after fermentation. In terms of concentration and texture, they can both take it and profit from it. The glory of a grand aged Bordeaux is derived in part from oak – but in maturity you shouldn’t spot it; the oak will have been digested by the wine.

Oak, though, becomes a liability whenever this is not true. If a red wine is oaky in youth yet still shows oakily at point of drinking, it’s a flop. Few drinkers nowadays want the homogeneity of permanent extraneous oak.

Many of the red wines that were routinely barrel-aged 20 years ago, we now realise, don’t need small or young oak at all, notably those from warm-climate zones, or from varieties such as Grenache, Mourvèdre, Nebbiolo or Sangiovese.

This change in taste is a genuine 21st-century wine revolution; even so, many ambitious reds remain defaced rather than ennobled by oak. The revolution has some way to run.

In my glass this month

Johannes Hasselbach’s Gunderloch, Roter Schiefer Riesling Trocken 2024 comes from the less well-sited parts of the great Roter Hang vineyard, but still has the gorgeous burnt tang that this red slate site seems to impart, as well as the texture and flavour resonance of a wine at twice its price.

It’s kept well away from oak barriques, of course, as almost all Riesling wines are – with all the benefits that that implies for purity, clarity and limpidity of flavour.

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