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A plague of oak
Brian St. Pierre
Of all the flirtations that winemakers carry on, a passion for oak barrels may be the worst—and the denial that surrounds their doomed love affair can be heartbreaking (or hilarious, depending on your capacity for cynicism). “We went overboard on new oak barrels for a while, but now we’re taking it easier, and making food-friendly wines,” they say, with all the cheery conviction of a newcomer to a 12-step program. So you try their new vintage of Chardonnay, and it’s like chewing on a mouthful of toothpicks. They look you straight in the eye when they make their declarations, and they really seem to mean it, but you realize they’ve been sneaking around to the back door and giving in to their lust for woods named Allier and Limousin, two-timing our taste buds with those French hussies murmuring of tight grains and charring. Gus Sebastiani used to say, “If you want to taste wood, go bite a tree.” Are there any forests left unchewed in California?
It all started in Sonoma, when a rich man of impeccable taste started Hanzell Vineyards, near Boyes Hot Springs, in the early 1950s; his ideal wines were Burgundies, so he imported French oak barrels in which to age his Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, a little luxury that forever changed California wine. When he died in the early 1960s, Joe Heitz, over in the Napa Valley, bought the inventory—and the barrels—and sold the wines for $6 a bottle, top dollar back then, and great PR besides. Other winemakers jumped aboard. Pretty soon, French barrel-makers were driving new cars, vacationing in Tahiti, and even setting up branch offices in California. Within a decade, as California wines began kicking the stuffings out of French wines in competitive tastings, oak barrels were taken for granted, expensive but necessary.
The worm in this golden apple turned out to be good old American zeal—if a little oak was a good thing, then more was better, right? In a kind of my-dog’s-better-than-your-dog smackdown, young winemakers pumped up the volume by charring the wood, often kept the wine in barrels for years, and made that flavor a key point of reference. It was viral, too: If an Aussie winemaker won a gold medal with a Chardonnay that tasted like fruit salad and sawdust, some California stockbroker-turned-vintner would return fire with pencil shavings, butterscotch, and a high score from a wine guru with palate fatigue. It got to be like steroids in baseball—maybe there should be asterisks alongside some record-setting wines.
Now there’s a backlash, mostly from Europe, and it comes as a one-two punch. On the high-end, premium side of the wine business, there’s been a lot of growling from the wise men of the trade, people like Hugh Johnson and Michael Broadbent, who between them have more than 100 years of tasting seemingly every grape ever fermented (Broadbent recently wrote, in Decanter magazine, “I have become disillusioned by the yellow-gold, over-oaked, high-alcohol California bombshells. . .really not much fun.”)
The low blow comes, as it so often does, from the European Union, which has voted to allow the use of oak chips (known cutely as “oak alternatives”) to flavor cheap wines, in order to give the impression that they’re close relatives of the high-priced versions. It’s a trend started years ago in the factory wineries of California and Australia, which we bargain-hunters over here could ignore; now we’ll have to go hunting again, in search of honest wines that taste like wine.
Meanwhile, a Scottish brewery sent me a bottle of their new oak-aged beer. After a small taste, I decided to pour the rest into a saucer out in the back yard, to kill snails and slugs. So far, zero kills. Who knew gastropods had good taste?
Brian St. Pierre is an American wine writer living in London.
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