The wine was a technical perfection. It was made with beautiful, ripe fruit by a talented, technically proficient winemaker. The color was gorgeous, but there was one big problem. I could not bear to drink it. 

The wine tasted like a big California pinot — not, as they said on Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that. The problem was that this wine was from Burgundy. 

New oak and I have parted ways. The heavy use of new oak in this wine made it simply undrinkable — for me. I tried over three days, the whole weekend, returning to taste the wine each night, but the result was always the same, and the majority of the bottle ended up going down the drain. Everything I wanted to taste in this wine, the flavors I could tell were there, were now forever lost under a heavy layer of oak. Few things can destroy terroir more than new oak barrels. This was a wine that had lost any sense of place. 

I realize this falls under the “personal preference” category, but sometimes I wonder if that is true. When I Iooked up the winemaking information on this wine, I found they used 70% new oak on this pinot noir. Is that an authentic choice? Drinking a very oaky wine is like trying to listen to a conversation at a rock concert. You miss a lot of what is being said. 

The best wines let you look inside of them and have beautiful transparency. Once you succumb to the pleasures of more delicate wines, tasting wines with characteristics like prominent new oak flavors make you feel like these wines are screaming at you — perhaps a Screaming Eagle, if you will. 

My transition happened over the years, as, when we tasted through the barrels each vintage, my favorite wines were from older barrels. The wines in the new barrels were essentially undrinkable, and we would rationalize how they would add complexity to the final blend. All they added was overt oaky flavors that overwhelmed the elegant nuances of the wines in the older barrels. 

As you delve into the complexities of more delicately styled wines, you soon make a discovery — there is no such thing as “neutral oak”. 

Drinking wines without significant new oak used in their aging is kind of like going to a spa for a palate purge. Once your system is flushed out, everything feels different and, in this case, tastes different. Soon, as Steve Jobs said, you start to “think different.”

Once your palate is open to the experience, you soon understand the term “neutral oak” is a misnomer. Now, when you taste wines out of those three-year-old barrels you thought of as neutral, you can taste the oak flavors they still impart to the wine. The same goes for even older barrels. For white wines, their impact is even more pronounced. 

What do we want from barrels at Troon Vineyard? Obviously, not to leak, but most importantly that they do no harm. They must not overwhelm the flavors of the variety and the vineyard. Besides simply holding the wine, the role of a barrel is to provide a controlled rate of oxygen to the wine. This is why different shapes and sizes of barrels have come into use in various wine regions due to trial and error over the centuries. Those reasons were not always about wine quality, but for ease of transportation in regions like Bordeaux, where export markets were established long ago. From huge botti in Barolo to puncheons in Cornas to the slight differences between Bourguigone (228 l.) and Bordelaise (225 l.) barriques, there were many reasons these sizes were selected, but those reasons were always commercial, efficient storage and, although they might not have known it, for the controlled introduction of oxygen into the aging wine. The idea of heavy use of new oak is a very modern one, and in the past, even if they had liked the flavors of new oak, new barrels would have been an expensive luxury few could afford. 

The magic in barrels is that they let the wine breathe, but they are not alone as other very old wine storage methods also allow oxygen into the wine at ideal rates for developing young wines. We already have five amphorae and concrete tanks are also very exciting and both last a bit longer than your average barrel. Both are investments I am hoping to expand in the near future. 

The use of high percentages of new oak and the rise of cult wines are intertwined — the more dollars than sense school of winemaking and wine buying. Now the key to making a mediocre wine seem expensive to the average consumer is the heavy use of “oak alternatives”, which is simply adding wood chips to wines in stainless steel tanks to add the sweet flavors of oak to a wine. You get the flavor, but no oxygen, but no problem; they can just add that too. Winemaking is transformed into beverage alcohol production.

There is nothing wrong with liking heavily oaked wines. If you like that flavor, go for it; there is no arguing taste. But you are giving up something as those wines taste more-or-less the same, no matter where the grapes were grown. To handle all that new oak, you have to harvest super-mature grapes, and overripe fruit loses not only its unique taste of place, but the very nature of the variety itself. Suddenly pinot noir starts to taste more like hollow syrah. To make matters worse, you’ll end up paying more as all that oak is costly, and those that make these massive wines in massive bottles also have massive egos, which demand massive prices. 

Quantity should not be confused with quality. The restaurants with the biggest portions do not have the best food. Wine quality should not be defined by the amount of flavor, but by the quality of the experience. To have that experience, you have to taste the wine itself, not the aging vessel. Even with the best speakers, if you turn the volume up enough, the music will be distorted. 

When buying wine you should get what you paid for — wine.