Wines are on Oak

This was a high production week for making booze (3 batches of beer and work on two different batches of wine), which didn't leave me much time for blogging, as a result I'm condensing down my labor on the wine into a double post.

Last Wednesday, after way too long in the office, I made it out to San Francisco and met up with Spencer, Luke and Walsh. Since they were finishing up their meals at the Blue Jay Cafe (my old Western Addition standby) as I made it there, I ordered the creole and powered it down so we'd have time to rack the Cabernet. Luke's new garage is well appointed to do the transfer of wine with a sink, good lights, plenty of space and easy access to the gutter. We measured and added the suflites to the empty carboy to sanitize it. Then we siphoned the wine out of the carboy it had occupied since December and into its new home another carboy.

The twist during this racking is that we've added oak balls to the wine. As I mentioned in an earlier post, these are the poor man's way to approximate the flavor of an oak barrel. The tricky part for us first time winemakers is knowing the right time to get the wine off the oak so the wine doesn't soak up too many of the woods tannins and overpower the wine's flavor. It's all based on judgment and frequent tastings. You want to pull the wine off the oak with another racking when the wine's been imparted with just a tiny hint of the flavor of the oak. It's difficult to get right your first time, since the flavors of the wine are still very young and will continue to develop as the wine ages. This will continue even after the wine has been bottled.

The wine racking was easy, there was little in the way of lees or other sediments left after our previous racking. We may have been a little too conservative and left too much of the lees behind with our initial racking, but with as infrequently as we have time to mind the wine, this only results in a small drop in volume and maintains the quality of the finished wine.

To assist us in getting the oaking right we tasted the just racked wine. It is a little less fruity than the last time we racked and the flavors are starting to develop, but the wine is still very young. The oak should add a little depth to the flavor and further develop the wine's taste.

Here is the oak on the wine. It's tough to see the brown of the oak in the inky red of the wine and the garage lighting, but they're there in the carboy. The oak is a medium toast french oak that was passed to us by a winemaker friend. I'm thinking they may be a higher quality than the oak cubes we're using for the Syrah. We'll see during the various rounds of tastings in the coming weeks.

That's the 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon on what's approximately Day 167.

Up next on Saturday, I added oak to the Syrah, which had been racked a few weeks ago.

As I mentioned earlier, we are using oak cubes for the Syrah. They're a bit smaller than the oak balls we're using on the Cabernet Sauvignon and a heavier toast (on two of the three types of oak) which will impart a different flavor profile than the medium toasted oak. As with the Cab, tasting the wine is going to be important to ensure we don't over oak the wine. The tasting during this racking revealed a flavor very similar to what we encountered during our previous racking. A very mellow and light flavor, though it did vary a little from carboy to carboy, the natural variation of when in the press each was filled and variation of the different fermentation tanks the carboys were filled from. We've managed to track this through labeling each carboy and tracking the contents during racking. Hopefully all this effort will allow us to learn from our experiences and improve future batches of wine.

Again, the oak in the wine is not particularly visible in the neck of the carboy. The oak cubes carried a few air bubbles into the wine, unlike the oak balls. I'll be curious to see if this takes the wine's flavor in a slightly more oxidized direction.

From Winemaking 1.0

I also need to thank my lovely assistant, Sara. I did bribe her into helping me with the offer of wine tastings, but her help made schlepping the carboys and getting the oaking right easier. So thanks good looking.

So that's the Syrah on Day 156.

Oak Cubes

Based on our tastings of the wine during racking, we're going to need to impart a little more flavor to the wine to really make it hit its peak. To do this we are going to add oak to the wine to imitate the flavor imparted by barrel aging wine. Since barrels are prohibitively expensive and require a lot of care and maintenance, we are going to take the easy way out an use oak balls and oak cubes in the barrel's place.

Oak balls and oak cubes have the advantages of they are cheaper than ($3-5 per 2 ounces vs. $300-$500) and impart their flavor faster (2-3 months vs. 6 months) than oak barrels. They also grant us great flexibility, since we can add them much later in the process and still get close to the same flavor extraction and we can mix varieties of oak, which is tough to do in a barrel. There are also oak chips and oak dust available, both of these suffer from some issues of their own. They have too much surface area and impart their flavor too quickly to the wine. This results in harsh tasting wine and it doesn't benefit from more than a week or two on the wine. Cubes and balls take a few months, which gives the flavors time to slowly meld with the wine and more closely approximate the flavor gain from barrel aging wine.

The variety I speak of comes from a few sources. There are different types of oak used for wine flavoring, the two most common types are French oak and American oak. French oak imparts predominately spice flavors and a full mouth feel to wine and American oak imparts predominately sweet and coffee flavors to the wine. In looking at oak options, I also found Hungarian oak, which adds vanilla flavors and unique black pepper and leather flavors. Being a huge fan of variety I purchased adequate amounts of oak to flavor a third of the wine with each oak option.

Another variable is toast of the oak. The lower the toast of the oak, the more tannins and wood like flavors it will impart to the wine. The higher the toast the more spice and smoke notes will be imparted to the wine. The deeper the toast (the longer the wood was toasted, rather than higher heat toasting used in a heavy heat toast) the more caramel flavors are imparted to the wine. I was limited in the options I had for toasts, since it is late in the wine aging season and therefore many varieties were sold out at the retail outlets I checked. Therefore I got a medium toasted Hungarian oak and heavy toasted French and American oak in sufficient quantities to recreate "new oak" flavor in all the carboys. They should be showing up in a week and shortly there after I'll be adding the different oaks to the Syrah. I also ordered enough so that we can add some to the Cabernet.