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.