Oak – flavour favourite

Oak seems to be responsible for much of wine's taste and aroma these days, and also for some dried-out dreariness. Tim James waxes polemical in a plea for a turn to a different tradition.

A word-search through the Platter Guide or the archives of Wine magazine tastings would, I am sure, turn up a high proportion of such descriptors as ‘toasty’, ‘vanilla’, ‘smoky’, ‘spicy’ – words relating more to flavours derived from oak than to those from grapes of whatever variety. Words that one would scarcely have found in the literature of wine half a century back. Oak has become the world's favourite wine flavourant additive.

Historically, the main benefit of using wood in winemaking – apart from its primary purpose as providing an efficient container – has been the slow oxidation it allows to the wine stored in it over a few years. The substances it imparts, given suitable varieties and conditions, can also contribute to the complexity of taste and bouquet of mature wines. In most parts of the world, until the rise to prominent fashionability of particularly California, followed by Australia, there had been no conscious attempt to derive flavours from barrels – quite the reverse, generally. Shiraz in the Rhône valley, the red wines of Italy, white wines from Germany, Chablis and the Loire, for example, all were traditionally made and matured in wood, true, but the casks (not invariably of oak) were generally old, with little tannin and flavour left to impart, and often very much larger than the now common 225-300 litre barrels, with their much smaller surface area in relation to volume.

The two areas which systematically made use of new, smaller barrels were, in fact, the most prestigious for red wine: Burgundy and Bordeaux – particularly the latter, which has provided the world with, on the whole, its primary model for making red wines. But even in Bordeaux half a century back, a producer would have been startled to be questioned about the cellar's use of oak, and books, articles and chat about the region or its wineries did not bother to mention the proportion of new oak used, or the forest from which it came – let alone the level of toasting it had undergone.

In far-flung South Africa too, the conscious use of the small new barrel dates back only to the early-mid 1980s – significantly for the newfangled ‘Bordeaux blends’ then starting to proliferate. Those famously successful wines of the 1960s and ’70s (from Chateau Libertas, Neder-berg, Bertrams), still drinking beautifully, still to an extent still Cape paragons, never saw a new French barrique in their lives.

Now the situation is very different, here and around the world. Barrel producers are smiling happily, as more and more wine announces itself with those odours of vanilla, toast, spiciness that would have rendered them strange to winedrinkers a half-century back. For whatever reason, these smells and flavours are now common in wines with which they were never associated in the past (shiraz, nebbiolo, even chenin and sauvignon blanc!), and are more prominent in cabernet and associated blends, and in pinot noir and chardonnay.

The problem

Does this matter? To object to heavy wooding simply because the practice is not traditional is to be merely reactionary. But I think it does matter, for various reasons. One is that overwooding is part of an obnoxious ‘dumbing down’ of wine: it is providing a simple, powerful flavouring with which the new wine-drinker (especially of the status-seeking type) can readily identify. I suspect the unconscious reasoning goes thus: the more new wood, the easier it is to identify the wine as expensive and, therefore, good. No obvious wood – well, clearly the winemaker didn't think much of the wine, being unwilling to lavish oak on it!

Other flavours – those associated with terroir, particularly, but even the subtler varietal aspects – are being subjugated. There must be a huge number of people who, for example, identify the flavours of chardonnay with what they have come to associate with the wines made from this grape: toastiness, butterscotch, vanilla.

The flavours of wood can be powerful and obvious and attractive (when American oak is used, even more so). A local shiraz which has won some important international awards is so dominated by wood-associated flavours that surely no-one could identify its grape – let alone its region of origin – if it were served blind. A pinotage, which was received with acclaim not only by the Absa Top Ten judges last year but also by its Platter taster this year and by some foreign judges and buyers, reeks of wood. In fact, the pinotage's wood flavours all came from staves, not from barrels: the wood, that is, served no structural purpose, it was nothing more or less than a flavourant.

Would it be too harsh to suggest that any winemaker who makes use of wood-chips or wood staves in tanks is not a serious producer? I think not. A serious wine producer does not use flavourants – whether it is adding green pepper essence to sauvignon blanc or wood-chips to pinotage, shiraz or cabernet. Of course, we do not want only serious wines, and if people want the flavour of wood in cheap wines, use chips, but please let us not pretend that they are used as anything other than an additive designed to have a particularl effect on aroma and taste; and do not regard the wine as more than the cynical, commercialised beverage it is.

Even at the apparently most ambitious end of winemaking, while producers piously mouth platitudes about great wine being made in the vineyards, they order in more new barrels for that expensive winemaker signature of wood!

That is one sort of problem that has arisen from the modern obsession with wood. There is another, with which we have also become only too familiar in South Africa: the effect of leaving wines in barrels for far long er than they can cope with it. Modest quality wines – often the producer’s second label (I can think of at least a few prominent examples of this) – are put into older, small barrels for 24 months or longer. The winemaker then proudly tells us that these are ‘quite serious wines – usually meaning that they have become extra-tannic and dried out, any juiciness they might once have had having long since given up the struggle to survive. There is seldom any real pleasure in these wines.

Top wines too can get dried out and woody-tannic from a too-lengthy stay in wood (new or old). This has been the reason offered by many modernists in places like Piedmont, Rioja and the Rhône for their shift to shorter periods in small new wood rather than the traditional longer periods in big, old casks: the old practices, they say, too easily and too often destroyed the fruit and freshness (partly a matter of oxidation, partly because of the difficulty of keeping older wood clean and hygienic). This has a real element of truth to it – even if the sceptical might suggest that the move was motivated at least as much by a desire to appeal to the international, especially American, market with the taste of new French oak.

It is as easy, in fact, for proponents of the new-wood modernists to find examples of bad old-style winemaking as it is for the traditionalists to offer cases where Parkerised new-wooding regimes overwhelm terroir and character. Poor, insensitive winemaking is going to produce disappointments, whatever the style chosen.

A different model

The real point to be made is that we in the Cape, like winemakers and winedrinkers in many parts of the world, are still too obsessed by the flavours of wood. What was once a winemaking strategy to bring out the best in particular kinds of grapes in specific conditions has become a recipe. Is there a single serious red wine now made in the Cape (or even a fairly serious one) which does not bear the imprint of wood? One which has been made and matured primarily in tank or large older barrels, rather than in barriques? I do not know of any. That is a treatment reserved for the less important wines of the cellar. Why, as we are discovering the great suitability of the Rhône varieties for our climate, are our winemakers not also discovering the traditional practices of the Rhône? There one can find a range of wines – from the inexpensive modest to the expensive and sublime – which have never come near a small barrel, let alone a new one.

I am not suggesting that we abandon the model of Bordeaux – far from it. I wish, in fact, that more winemakers would re-discover it properly rather than relying on its Californian-Australian re-interpretation and learn that if the great Bordeaux producers do not put their wines into all-new oak for two years, perhaps that is something worth following. Few wines benefit from two years in new small wood – however much the producer enjoys telling us about the forest, the cooper, the degree of toasting.

But there is another model that is also worth attention (it could also save a lot of money!): wine that speaks less of oak, and more of fruit, more of terroir. We need that too, at all levels: from the simply delicious, to the complexly great; from the equivalent of an unpretentious but joyous Côtes-du-Rhône, to the equivalent of a magnificent Rayas Châteauneuf-du-Pape or Chave Hermitage. At the moment, we have neither.