All About Oaked Chardonnay

Written by Matthew Sullivan | 27 October 2009

There are two kinds of wine lovers in the world. Which camp do you call home?

First, there are those who are fed up after a lifetime of drinking cheap Chardonnay at office parties and baby showers. Their cri de coeur is “No more! No more oaked Chardonnay. Give me fresh fruit character — or give me death.” You know you belong to this group if you get a headache merely by looking at the label of Lindemans Bin 65. After years of being a voice in the wilderness, this camp is now ascendant. At restaurants and bars, Sauvignon Blanc is replacing Chardonnay as the white wine of involuntary reflex. Although sleek white is still one of the most planted varietals, wineries increasingly turn to stainless steel vats in order to keep their wine light and juicy. Oak is out.

The second group of wine lovers is the minority that keeps the faith, holding a torch for oak-heavy numbers. Let the rest of the world order something that won’t strong-arm the shrimp cocktail; this diehard remnant likes their white wine plump and indulgent. I am proud to count myself among this group. Proud and defiant. I like my Chardonnay so thick that you can twist it around a spoon and spread it over toast. In my view, well-oaked Chardonnay fuses the two opposites of gravity and weightlessness into one dynamic package. Unfashionable though it may be, a wine contaminated with oak — a dirty Chardonnay — is the pinnacle of the winemaker’s art.

Some of the effects of oak are not controversial. Barrel aging clarifies and stabilizes wine without resorting to filtration or the use of additives. Sitting in a barrel also gradually exposes the wine to oxygen, a process which quickens maturation but keeps it graceful. However, the primary effect of oak is to leech flavours from the wood into the wine. Who doesn’t love coconut, vanilla, clove and tea? Oils and phenols from the barrel replicate these flavours in the wine. This gives the winemaker tremendous power to increase the complexity of the wine, but at the risk of pitting the oak in competition against the grape’s natural flavours. Such power is open to abuse, usually when mega-wineries use cruddy barrels or wood chips to concoct a beverage that looks like wine but tastes like cotton candy melting on a radiator.

A decent winemaker has many tools to manage the way oak influences her wine. Large barrels decrease the surface area of wood relative to the volume of wine, muting the oak’s power. New oak imparts stronger flavours than used barrels; many wine producers prefer barrels that have been broken in for a year or two. American oak contains more lactones, imparting a coconut flavour, but French oak is considered more elegant. Finally, there is time: a bottle with a great deal of oak requires time to age in the cellar, so the diverse flavours can integrate.