Winemaking With Oak Alternatives

Alison Crowe

HIGHLIGHTS

- Oak alternatives are no longer the exclusive domain of huge wineries. Though many winemakers are reluctant to discuss them, these products are widely used throughout the industry.

- Winemakers who use oak alternatives often use micro-oxygenation to help simulate the oxygen exchange of traditional oak barrels.

- Using tank staves more than once can impart a more subtle oak character to wine.

It's no secret that oak-alternative products (also known as barrel alternatives) are in widespread use throughout the U.S. wine industry. Just flip through the "oak alternatives" section of the Wines & Vines Annual Directory/Buyer's Guide and you'll find more than two dozen suppliers of oak staves, chips, balls, segments and other oak additives. The companies that manufacture and sell these items are successful, thriving operations--a clear indication that there's a vigorous market for their products.

Thanks to less-than-positive press that gave oak alternatives an undeserved bad rap with wine consumers, few winemakers are willing to speak to the media about their use of these products. For example, the production manager for a highly respected Napa Valley winery I visited last month was happy to acknowledge that he uses oak chips for the winery's second-label brand (hardly Two-Buck Chuck at a retail price of $20 per bottle), but was also quick to ask me not to identify him in this story. When I asked him how many of his local winemaker friends use oak alternatives, he answered without hesitation: "Everybody."

Clearly, oak alternatives are no longer the exclusive domain of large corporate wineries or low-end wines. Techniques like micro-oxygenation are helping to better simulate the effects of traditional barrel aging, making oak alternatives an attractive option for wineries of all sizes.

Gary Horner, winemaker for Oregon's Erath Vineyards, readily agreed to share information with Wines & Vines readers about his use of oak alternatives. Horner uses 2-inch by 3-inch oak segments for Erath's 50,000-case Oregon Pinot Noir, which retails for $16 per bottle. He switched to segments from staves after he discovered that they have a quicker extraction cycle.

"Staves really have about an 18-month extraction cycle, and for our everyday Pinot, I have to have it bottle-ready in about nine months," he says. "So I was only getting about half of the usage out of the staves. When you go to segments your extraction is quicker; you can almost get full extraction in six months. It gets into the wine sooner, so it has time to mature and integrate with the wine before I start the blending process."

Horner has experimented with about 20 different oak alternative products over the years, and now uses a combination of three different segment products from three suppliers: Nadalie, Arôbois and Oregon Barrel Works. "I honed in on those because they give me the profile that I'm looking for," he says.

The segments have different toast levels, and Horner uses varying amounts of each product, based on his trials and calculations. "You have to start somewhere, and for us that somewhere was figuring out the percentage of new barrels we would use in this particular wine and the (internal) square footage of a barrel and trying to back calculate to the square footage of these blocks."

Through experience, Horner has found that oak alternatives tend to provide more oak aroma and flavor per square foot than barrels. "I think that's primarily because they're being extracted from all sides, and barrels are just from one surface," he says. "So I've actually backed off on the amounts I've used over the years."

The same percentage of oak segments is added to each tank, and all of the tanks undergo micro-oxygenation, which can help replicate the oxygen exchange benefits derived from barrels.

In addition to using segments during the aging process, Horner uses oak chips in the fermenter to help stabilize the wine's color. "A lot of us (winemakers)--from high-end down to the low-end folks--use chips in fermenters. It's a very widespread practice. At a certain dose, it results in basically zero flavor and aroma contribution, but it helps chemically stabilize long-term color."

Horner uses toasted oak chips made from the same wood used to make traditional barrels and aged in a similar manner. "We're trying to avoid any green, harsh flavors that can come from chips if they aren't sourced appropriately or toasted properly," he says.

Chips are not desirable for long-term aging, he believes, because it can be difficult to judge the toast level when the size of the chips is irregular. "You can get into an over-oaked situation very quickly, and from that there's no recovery. With segments, it's a gradual creeping up (of flavor), and if you are going over the top or getting close to it you can always remove them." The oak segments are packaged in a nylon mesh bag, which can be easily removed from the tank when the desired extraction level is reached.

Though he still uses traditional French oak barrels for Erath's single-vineyard and estate Pinot Noir wines, Horner says he stands behind his use of oak alternatives for the winery's everyday Pinot Noir, and makes a conscious effort to bring the practice out into the open.

"We educate our people in our tasting room and our public relations representatives to understand that in making the Oregon vintage Pinot we introduce micro-oxygenation in the presence of barrel alternatives," he says. "We aggressively promote it….I think people need to know, and will be interested in hearing the significant technological breakthroughs that are allowing us to make better, more consistent wines.

"I'm very adamant about telling people that we don't intervene unless we have to, but I'm never going back from this technology. It would make absolutely no sense. Granted, it's romantic to think about the wine being in the cave with the barrels and all that stuff, and we continue to do that with our other wines, but I'm quite confident that I could make those wines a little more consistent and better with these technologies. I'm totally sold."

Tank staves at McManis Photo: Chi Fang

Mike Robustelli, winemaker for McManis Family Vineyards in Ripon Calif., is also something of an oak-alternative evangelist. He uses everything from pencil-shaving-sized chips to 10-foot by 6-inch tank staves--and he doesn't care who knows it.

McManis sources its oak alternatives from numerous suppliers, including World Cooperage, Innerstave, Nadalie and Suber-Lefort (sold in the United States by Pickering Winery Supply). "We're constantly in the process of fine-tuning our flavor profiles and trialing products from other producers," Robustelli says. "It's time consuming, but we look at it in the same way that a lot of people look at their barrel programs. They're constantly trying woods from different forests, tighter or looser grains, different manufacturers, different toasting levels and methods."

The winery still has a small barrel program--0-20% of McManis reds are barrel aged--but is moving toward a barrel-free future, Robustelli says. Oak alternatives are used for the winery's Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Petite Sirah, Merlot and Zinfandel wines, which sell for $9.99 to $12 per bottle. Overall annual case production for the McManis label is about 170,000.

Like Horner, Robustelli uses oak alternatives in the fermentation process as well as in aging, and all of the winery's oak-aged reds undergo micro-oxygenation. When using large tank staves, he has found that they can be used more than once.

"With barrels, some winemakers will tell you that the best wine comes from maybe the second filling of a barrel, so they come up with barrel programs so the blend is not 100% new barrels," Robustelli explains. "We do a similar thing with our oak alternatives, where we'll cycle wine through a tank, and each time we'll add a little bit of new wood, but leave some older wood behind. The smaller the pieces the faster the extraction, so that technique is best used with the larger pieces, because that way there's still some flavor and aroma that the wood has to offer."

For Robustelli, using oak alternatives makes good economic sense, while producing good results. "Barrels are an expensive proposition," he explains. "It requires more labor to work the same number of gallons in barrels as it does to work that same number of gallons in a tank. Barrel storage also consumes more space. So with the price-point that we're in, in order to deliver a high-quality wine, the alternatives work better for us."

The benefits of winemaking with oak alternatives go beyond economic ones, according to Alison Crowe, winemaker for Plata Wine Partners, LLC, and consulting winemaker for Serenity Vineyards, both based in Napa, Calif. Crowe gained experience with oak alternatives--mostly untoasted French oak chips, used for color stability--while working for Bonny Doon, and other wineries. She currently uses StaVin oak beans for her red wine fermentations.

"I am experimenting with noncoopered oak for red fermentation, early on in a wine's life," Crowe says. "I really believe that the heat of fermentation helps extract tannins and phenolics that act as oxygen sinks, allowing me to use less SO2 at the crusher. The extra phenolics also help to stabilize the wine's color. I'm not looking for obvious oak aroma or flavor here--I find that by the time the wines are done fermenting they don't really have much obvious oak character, which is what I like."

She also finds that oak alternatives give her an extra measure of control in the winemaking process. "Say you've got your 2004 Santa Barbara County Pinot Noir down in the cellar in a barrel lot and you want to rack it back out to stainless steel to avoid getting too much oak flavor and aroma into it," Crowe says. "Maybe you're in the middle of bottling and your crew can't get to it for three weeks. By that time it might be too late....If you had part of that lot out in stainless steel tank on staves, you could rack it off in one movement, avoiding overoaking the whole lot. To me that's better, smarter, more quality-oriented winemaking than letting a wine languish in too much oak because your bottling schedule didn't allow you to get to it."

Crowe adds that it's useful to "think outside the barrel," in order to optimize the benefits of winemaking in stainless steel. "I think fully utilizing stainless steel--whether it be with innovative techniques like lees suspension, micro-oxygenation or a judicious use of noncoopered oak--allows us to broaden our winemaking horizons beyond the homogenous styles that barrels used to shackle us to….It's winemaking that allows the grapes to speak their own particular truths--truths that were often, in the historical and recent past, obscured by the necessity of using cooperage for fermentation and storage."

Despite her open-minded approach to winemaking with oak alternatives, Crowe emphasizes that she is also a barrel-lover. "I am a firm believer in giving your wines what they need to maximize their inherent quality," whether it's traditional oak barrels, tank staves or oak beans.

"We just do ourselves and our wines--and eventually, the consumer--justice when we look at all possible options to add quality to our wines….I think winemakers are doing themselves and their wines a disservice if they don't at least take a look at noncoopered oak for their wines."

There is much to be gained by opening up an honest dialogue about oak alternatives between winemakers, consumers and the media, Crowe adds.

"I think it would further the understanding that the consumer has about the winemaking process in general, which is always a win-win for wine producers and wine-enjoyers alike."

(Wines & Vines would like to hear about your experiences making wine with oak alternatives. Please contact tinac@winesandvines.com.)