Postmodern Winemaking. Clark Ashton Smith
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Postmodern Winemaking - Clark Ashton Smith страница 21
Название: Postmodern Winemaking
Автор: Clark Ashton Smith
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Кулинария
isbn: 9780520958548
isbn:
Oak can be a source of a wide variety of sweet elements. Untoasted wood supplies a coconut influence (whiskey lactone), usually subliminal, which lifts out varietal fruit aromas. This compound is rich in French forests where sessile oak species (Quercus petraea or Q. sessiliflora) predominate, such as those of Alliers, Vosges, and Argonne. Alternatively, toasting can enrich vanilla, toffee, and sometimes sweet coffee elements. The flame converts cellulose to cellobiose, an exotic sugar that can feed Brettanomyces. It is important to match the wood you are using to the deficiency you are trying to address.
4. Framing
The oak selections that supply framing are opposite to those providing sweetness. Certain forests, particularly those of eastern Europe and Limousin, which favor the pedunculated species Quercus robur, supply wood containing the most tannin. Moderate toast can bring out spice elements that accent mouthfeel. Very heavy toast can produce deep espresso notes, which frame fruit well and enrich flavor persistence in the finish. As in the Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm,” it is generally best to employ these influences with great restraint.
5. Structure for Aromatic Integration
Wines containing vegetal or microbial notes often benefit from enhanced structure, which can serve to integrate these aromas into the background, allowing them to merge with and support fruit character. Oak can assist this process indirectly in several ways already discussed, such as anthocyanin extraction and structural supplementation. Oak introduced during primary fermentation can also provide sacrificial tannins that remove protein and deactivate yeast enzymes destructive to color. Structural enhancements may call for extractives of gallic acid from wood, usually in the form of high-quality untoasted oak chips.
Aromatic integration should not be confused with aromatic masking. We are not trying to use oak aromas to cover up vegetal or microbial defects, but rather we seek help from oak supplements in creating a structure that incorporates them into an integrated whole. The goal is that all the wine’s natural elements are clearly apparent but are incorporated into an aromatic whole such that they all make sense together, in the same way that a symphony conductor combines the sounds of a cornet, an oboe, and a violin into an integrated single voice.
6. Curing Aromatics; 7. Toasting Aromatics
Oak aromatics receive so much emphasis that little need be said here. A year of air curing is essential for degrading plankiness (trans-2-nonenol) and to enhance whiskey lactone. The longer subsequent curing occurs, the more ellagitannins are leached. High temperature is necessary to create clove spice, vanilla, caramelization, and espresso aromas.
I list these functions last because all too often the first five functions are ignored when choosing an oak regimen. Decisions based solely on aromatic embellishment result in unbalanced wines—cloyingly sweet or overly framed, with poor structure and problematic integration of aromas, tiring easily in the cellar.
SHIPS INTO CHIPS
The magical changes that occur in the maturation process in the barrel are not easily replicated. Barrels breathe. They inhale a small, steady dose of oxygen. More uniquely, they exhale, cleaning the wine of funky off-odors. They facilitate settling, good lees contact, and interaction between reductive and oxidative zones within a small space, with intriguing flavor benefits.
Old barrels do all these things quite as well. So we buy new barrels . . . why? New barrels as a source of barrel extractives are fiscally foolish and environmentally reprehensible. High-quality chips, when prepared with skill and care, provide these extractives much more reliably, responsibly, and economically.
French oak barrels are made from 200-year-old trees planted by Napoleon to build future navies. When bark is stripped away and heartwood removed, some 25% of the premium wood remaining yields staves for barrels (fig. 7). The rest, perfectly good wood, is generally discarded. Why? Because winemakers want to look cool.
For the past decade, I have completely separated in my own work the function of a neutral barrel from the use of extractives. I find it silly that we regularly purchase pieces of fine oak furniture for $1,200 each for use as flavoring agents. Fortunately, a postmodern sea change is under way. Talented coopers today take this precious wood resource, air cure it, and custom toast chips according to a wide variety of regimens for specific uses. I haven’t bought a new barrel since 1999, and likely never will.
FIGURE 7. Oak waste in barrel production. French oak forsts are two hundred years old when they are cut down for barrel production. Of the prime wood, 75% goes unused for wine simply because it cannot be employed in building barrels. Why cut these trees down at four times the necessary rate?
SCORING THE SUBLIME
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, a barrel is like a box of chocolates: you just never know what you’re gonna get. The innate variability in oak forests, even within a single tree (south side vs. north side, high vs. low), is staggering. An exhaustive French government-funded study by INRA in the mid ’90s documented vast inconsistency in wood composition everywhere they looked.
The point was hammered home at a seminar on oak held at California State University Fresno in 2001. First, Jeff Cohen, then at Rosenblum Cellars, treated us to a book of splendid prose from his own hand, comprising one-page sensory descriptions of twenty-seven cooperage house styles, an extremely well articulated and perceptive guide.
The next talk featured Steve Pessagno, who stated disarmingly that he would be more comfortable with barrel alternatives if only he knew what he was doing. Meanwhile, he said, he could get all the complexity he desired from the variability in Seguin Moreau’s medium toast. If he filled fifty barrels with Cabernet, he could expect after a year to select ten for reserve, ten to dump on the bulk market, and the rest would become his regular bottling, imbued with far more nuance and complexity than he could ever intentionally bring about.
This is not very good news for the guy who only has six barrels. And for the vast barrel warehouses at Mondavi Woodbridge, Bronco, and any number of other behemoths, averaging has taken the place of the human attention that might be given the same wine in tank. The barrel evokes a powerful symbol of artisanality for the wine lover, but in large operations, small cooperage utterly removes the winemaker from intimate knowledge of the wine that a tank would provide. But barrels look really cool.
THE GLORIOUS STAVE, THE HUMBLE CHIP
Full disclosure: I used to sell Oenodev’s chips, and I still love them. But what I really longed for was to sell staves. So sexy. The oak alternatives halfway house, stacked inside a tank but otherwise just like barrels, right? I begged my French colleagues to make them. They would love to, they said, if not for the unfortunate fact (as they explained in that patient, diplomatic way all Frenchmen have) that staves are very stupid.
The biggest challenge confronting winemakers and oak vendors is the problem of reliable consistency. One sample won’t tell you much, because products vary from lot to lot. Jeff Cohen’s treatise is precious because it reflects decades of experience from which he extracted an average profile for each cooper, albeit an ideal to which no single barrel actually conforms.
A piece of wood as big as a stave, my French colleagues instructed me, can never be produced consistently. Sure enough, I remember once unloading a truckload of hundreds of staves, stacking them in two identical tanks, and filling each with the same Merlot for micro-oxygenation. One tank took 35 ml/L/month for three weeks; the other took 75 ml for six weeks. Subtracting whatever the oxygen uptake might have been from the Merlot’s native tannin, that’s a lot of difference. I saw their СКАЧАТЬ