We all go crazy about our wines and malts, slobbering something silly like drunken melodramatic verbose odes disguised as erudite tasting notes. Many of us even pause to pay our dues to the cask that cradles these beauties to near-perfection. But do we really understand oak or do we just like it because it makes wine pricey, and, by inverse relations, all pricey wines share this smell of oak?
Recently I have had a lot of interactions with the barrel and not just because I have returned from Brussels where I was neck-deep in Obelix memorabilia, including his choice of barrel-shaped clothing (I hate to give a punch line away but still). My oak-thoughts are thanks to Francois Witasse, the man responsible for the success of the Demptos brand of barrels. He visited us in India in an effort to educate us about the benefits of oak and also to promote his wares. We don’t mind a commercial pitch, provided it comes at the end of a healthy learning experience so yes, I did turn up for that presentation.
Long story short, his point was poignant: oak is not to make a wine oaky. For that, you have oak chips. Oak is to age a wine, to imbibe it with a certain rounded quality that can’t be found anywhere except through prolonged oak-contact.
You see, oak is porous like an amphora, or a matka (earthen pot) if you will. Just like when water in a pot is kept cool since some of it evaporates through the pores, the oak barrel allows the wine a gentle and extremely slow contact with oxygen through its pores. Also, the contact with the wood itself removes a lot of harsh components from the wine. This helps a wine mature – softening the tannins, making the fruit more stable, fixing the colour the aromas, and the palate. Oxygen is what brings about a lot of this but only when the contact is in absolutely infinitesimally small quantities spread out over the longest possible periods of time all in an undisturbed dark, humid environment.
But people for long have misunderstood oak. Actually, let me rephrase that, people today misunderstand oak. In earlier times, before concrete and steel, oak was the only receptacle man could fashion out of his environment, so all beverages were stored there: wine, beer, whisky, et al. With time, options have grown; oak has now become more of a finishing tool than an ingredient in the making of fine beverages. This shift in understanding will be rather detrimental to the way drinks are perceived. For one, most of us already believe that a beverage must smell, no wait, reek of oak before it can be considered ‘precious’. From whisky to wine, we embrace oak like a tree-hugger embraces a… well, a tree (the irony here being that oak comes from felled trees, and there I go explaining another punch line).
Back to Bacchus, the notion that oak makes a wine better is just plain wrong. Only nature can supply the most qualitative of raw ingredients ( grapes ) and our job is to use them in the right manner. The knowledge of what, when, which, how, and how much comes only with experience; experience of working with the land and experience that comes from within – something that the French have packaged deftly and sold incredibly well by labelling it Terroir .
So am I anti-oak? Definitely not. All I’m trying to say is that at a time when so many of Indian wines are experimenting and propagating their oak-enhanced versions (Sette, Chêne, Rasa, to name a few) and even Indian whiskies are making their mark (Amrut, Paul John) we must be careful in acknowledging the power of this element and understand how to harness it dexterously. As an eminent vino once shared with me, “We are winemakers not carpenters, therefore our product should remind of fruit and not wood.” There is no better a time than now to remind ourselves of this modern adage.
Magandeep Singh is India's first sommelier, food, wine and travel writer and TV show host. His passions include studying languages and choking the saxophone. In his free time he works.
