Oak: the Middle East politics of the wine world
Pick of the week
Domaine Nadine Ferrand Macon Blanc 2006 ($17.95, No. 0085019). This entry-level white Burgundy is medium-bodied and deliciously ripe. Hints of apple and mineral get added complexity from a nutty tang.
Oak.
The word might seem insufficient to hold down a whole paragraph. But this is a wine column. Oak is the issue of the century.
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Do you like your wine to taste strongly of vanilla, coffee or charred wood? Those are telltale signs that it has spent months maturing in toasty oak barrels. Are you instead a fan of crisp acidity and fresh-fruit flavours. Your wine probably saw very little time in barrel, possibly in used barrels rather than new wood, or it may have been aged entirely in stainless-steel tanks.
Oak is the great wine divide, the oeno-analogue to Middle East politics, stem-cell research and music by Coldplay. You can love it or loathe it, but no passionate wine drinker is neutral about oak.
Oddly, most makers of fine wine would say publicly that they like to play down oak. No wonder. Oak has become politically incorrect in these organic times because wood, though natural, is technically an additive. In fact, in lower-priced wines, wood shavings are tossed into vats and stirred around like parmesan in a bowl of minestrone. This is a lot cheaper and faster than aging a cabernet in $1,000 French-oak barrels for 18 months.
Wine, like so much shopping that passes for cooking nowadays, is supposed to be about farming, not human intervention. But clearly it's also about hypocrisy. Even producers of merlots that taste like vanilla-mocha frappuccinos will say their wine was "made in the vineyard" and simply "kissed by oak." Try glancing at the back-label description on a bottle you find excessively oaky some time.
I'm not sure how things got to be this way. Mainly it's backlash, I suppose, sort of like how everybody started listening to "unplugged" recordings in the early 1990s on rebound from all that 1980s technopop.
Wine's own technopop era (coincidentally reaching its apogee in the 1980s) was epitomized by Wolf Blass, the German-born, bowtie-sporting Australian winemaker famous for the line "No wood, no good." (His wines, in particular the chardonnays, have since been deforested to a good degree.)
But it's obvious that many consumers, and certainly no shortage of powerful wine critics, still love the added velvetiness, subtle sweetness and mocha-coffee-toasty quality of overt oak. That toastiness, by the way, comes from varying degrees of actual charring of the wood over an open fire. In the right context, say, a barbecued-rib cookout, I can be fond of the style myself. (Just don't report me to the International Sommelier Guild, please.)
So it's refreshing, in a manner of speaking, to come across a wine that wears its oak on its sleeve. Café Culture Pinotage 2007 from South Africa ($13.95, Ontario product No. 0072710) is what you might pejoratively call an oak bomb. More generously, you could call it a Triple-shot Vente FrappuVino. In fact, the name Café Culture is not coincidental. Winemaker Bertus Fourie specifically wanted to showcase the uncanny, roasted-coffee flavours imparted by aging in heavily charred oak. The term for coffee roasting, torrefaction, is in fact also used in wine.
This wine is full-bodied and almost syrupy, with a lusciously smooth texture, flavours of sweet blackberry and plenty of creamy, smoky, earthy sweetness. Unlike most pinotages, this one barely exhibits that familiar burnt-rubber flavour. The wine also won a gold medal at South Africa's Michelangelo International Wine Awards competition.
I would be remiss in speaking of monster oak influence without invoking the name Torbreck. I've never visited this Australian winery, beloved of influential American critic Robert Parker, but I imagine it to be a giant log cabin. The red wines make no secret of their time in wood. And the appropriately named Torbreck Woodcutter's Shiraz 2006 ($24.95, No. 0927533; $32.99 in British Columbia, No. 78154) is nothing if not a crowd pleaser for Frappuccino Nation. In most, though not all, years, including this 2006, it's quite a compelling oak bomb, I must say. This one is a chocolate-covered espresso bean that walks like a wine, brimming with concentrated dark-skinned fruits, wood spice and a liqueur-like warmth, with good acidity and black-pepper spice to keep things lively on the finish.
In a very different place on the oak spectrum is an well-priced white wine in today's Vintages release, Domaine Nadine Ferrand Macon Blanc 2006 ($17.95, No. 0085019). This entry-level white Burgundy, from the concentrated fruit of mature, 45-year-old vines, is medium-bodied and deliciously ripe. Hints of apple and mineral get added complexity from a nutty tang in this surprisingly evolved chardonnay from Burgundy's excellent 2006 vintage for whites.
Though Australian chardonnays get a bad rap for exhibiting too much lumber, I was impressed with the relative restraint in Penfolds Thomas Hyland Chardonnay 2007 ($18.95, No. 0611228; $21 in British Columbia, same product number). Ripe melon and apple get a lively lift from crisp acidity and support from subtle, nicely integrated oak. A well-made, crowd-pleasing, full-bodied white.
Among the best values of today's Ontario release, unquestionably, is Altos Las Hormigas Malbec 2006 ($12.95, No. 0640490; $15.95 in British Columbia, No. 522888). This full-bodied Argentine red shows concentrated black-skinned fruits, dark chocolate and fairly conspicuous spicy oak. Very nice long finish for such an affordable wine.
Also well-priced is Château La Casenove La Colomina 2005 from southern France ($15.95, No. 0074542). Fruity but with a nice, classically south-French savoury-licorice quality, it's clean and quite modern, if only slightly betraying its considerable, 14.5-per-cent alcohol.
And also worth the money is Corte Zovo Sa Solin Ripasso Della Valpolicella 2004 ($16.95, No. 0650713), a full-bodied Italian red with rich fruit, delicate spice and herbs and, here it comes again, roasted coffee.
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Jean-Louis Kayitenkore
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