Barrels:  What the Michigan Vintner has Learned the Hard Way

Funny how you can read volumes on a subject yet get most of your “ah ha” moments as a direct result of ill-informed decisions

 Legend has it that Elijah Craig, a preacher and moonshiner, was bending barrel staves by the traditional method of the day with fire.  Right in the middle of bending the staves and assembling a barrel he got called away in an emergency for a dying parishioner.   When he returned to his barrel, it had become quite charred with the interior looking like black alligator skin.  Being a frugal man of limited means, instead of using the scorched barrel for firewood, he filled it with white lightning.   After a few years, the whiskey had turned brown and had the most magnificent aroma and flavor ever conceived in the history of moonshine.   Thus, was the birth of Bourbon whiskey.

Whether there is any historical truth in this tale or not, up until a little more than a few centuries ago, barrels were simply a convenient storage vessel while wine and whiskey makers had little appreciation for the changes in flavor that liquors or wines underwent while in those barrels.   As recently as the 1980’s a reporter was interviewing the winemaker at a classified Bordeaux and remarked that he was surprised that the winery did not own a single barrel and that all of the wine was stored and aged in enamel lined concrete tanks.   The winemaker quickly assured the reporter that there was no need to put the wine in barrels because the same result could be achieved by simply pumping the wine through the air and allowing it to splash around.   The winemaker was referring to the process of micro-oxygenation that a barrel provides never even considering the notion that anyone in his right mind would actually want their wine to taste like an oak barrel.

Although the Bourbon whiskey business quickly made charred barrel maturation its signature process,  aging wine in new and flavorful barrels really didn’t make much headway until the 1960’s and 1970’s.   Certainly barrels have been used to store wine for many centuries, but, winemakers used the same barrels every year and didn’t retire them until they started to leak which may take as long as a hundred years.   Once a barrel has been used for maybe 4 or 5 years, it no longer imparts an oak flavor into the wine though it still retains some residual flavors from previous batches and importantly is a breeding ground for a menagerie of micro-organisms that can favorably affect the flavor and structure of the wine.   Wineries, of course, did add new barrels as old ones started to leak or as production increased, but, they were very careful to very gradually add only a few new ones per year so that the oak flavors of those new barrels wouldn’t be detected in the final overall blend of new and mostly old neutral barrels. 

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the California and Australian wine business exploded and grew exponentially.    It was no longer possible to bury a few new barrels amongst a vast stand of used ones.   As wineries literally doubled or tripled their production annually, the majority of their barrels were new.   To calm down the overt woodiness, toasting the barrels just a bit below that of a bourbon barrel not only seemed to make the wood taste more palatable to the winemakers, but, the consumers loved it!   In those days, many wines from the US and Australia tasted more like Bourbon than they did like traditional wines.    After a few decades of enormous growth,  production came back to a level where winemakers could add maybe 5-10% new barrels every year and restore the taste to what they believed it should be.   Consumers, however, had become used to the overt oak flavors and complained that winemakers had wimped out.   Consumers demanded more oak!  Today, many wineries replace 100% of their barrels every year to satisfy that consumer trend.   Another method of keeping old barrels tasting new is to add either a tea bag like permeable sack full of toasted sawdust or free floating toasted oak pellets (referred to as “beans”) into older barrels.

While out in Missouri in the late 1980's, we visited McGinnnis Wood Products and got a private tour of the plant from Bob Bell.  I ordered a couple of barrels and had them shipped back to Grand Rapids.  My first wine making experience with barrels came when I ordered a ton of Millot grapes from Lawton Ridge Vineyard located just west of Kalamazoo on a high warm ridge near Mattawan.   The resulting wine was light years better than any I had previously made.   Those barrels were heavy toast simply because that is what Bob told us that most of the good winemakers were using.

A few years later, our friends Scott and Ruth Walker had their first crop of Chardonnay from their vineyard in Northport.   They only had about a thousand pounds which was too little to sell to a winery, but, just right for a home winemaker like me.   I ordered a medium toast barrel from McGinnis to put it in, thinking that the heavy toast would be too much for a fresh light Northern Michigan Chardonnay.   Was I ever wrong!  The wine was hugely oaky; at least as oaky as the oakiest Australian Chard of the day.   Though I never made another Chardonnay, in the back of my mind, I thought, next time I’ll use lighter toast oak barrels; wrong again!

Fortunately, a blind pig does occasionally find an acorn.   Because I switched to making red wine exclusively, my misinformation about barrel toast served me well and my wines continued to improve as I increased the amount of toast and even started immersing heavily toasted “beans” into the barrels as well.  In the spring 2017 issue of the American Wine Society Journal, Kristine Austin discusses the influence of toasting oak on the resulting wine.   I was in disbelief when she stated that the less the toast the stronger the oak flavor and the heavier the toast the milder the oak flavor.   Having made wine for some 30 years, that fact went against everything I thought I knew.   So, my friends Tom and Kim LeRoux of Vineyard LeRoux cut some old staves I had laying around into dice-sized beans and toasted them at varying degrees from very light to very heavy toast.   They then put them in quart jars full of a 2015 Marquette that had been aged in a brand new air dried heavy toast Missouri White Oak barrel for a few weeks.  To our amazement, Kristine Austin was correct.   The jar with the lightly toasted beans was overwhelmingly oaky and that with the heavily toasted beans, not much different than the wine straight out of the barrel.   So, really, by accident I was right, sort of.

Lightly toasted oak imparts a strong flavor of caramel, butter, toffee and tree sap.  

Heavily toasted oak imparts a tamer flavor of vanilla, smoke, coffee and chocolate.

Hence, for the flavors I was going after, by accident, I got a lot more out of the heavily toasted barrels and avoided the flavors that really didn’t improve the flavor of red wine.

Here are the other three things I learned about barrels that are generally not explained well in most books on wine or spirits:

1.      Bourbon and Cognac are pure white (clear as water) when they go into the barrel at over 150 proof.   The alcohol is so strong it actually dissolves and leaches some of the color from the heavily toasted barrels to the point that it is as dark as black coffee.   By blending with distilled water prior to bottling, the resulting whiskey or brandy gets its beautiful amber tone.

2.      How is it possible for alcohol, which is vastly more volatile than water, to never evaporate from a barrel while water easily evaporates through the wood?    Winemakers continuously add wine to top off the barrels because the water content continually evaporates, yet, none of the alcohol ever evaporates.  Here is why.    Although wood is porous, the pores are very tiny.  The tiny H2O molecules easily fit through the pores in the wood and evaporate.  However the larger CH3CH2OH alcohol molecule doesn’t fit through the pores.   Therefore, wine becomes more concentrated, darker in color, and higher in alcohol after a few years in oak barrels.

3.      All barrels used to be air dried.  About 50 years ago, it was discovered that kiln dried barrels intended for Bourbon aging were just as good and much cheaper because, Bourbon makers want the flavor of the toast and do not necessarily want the flavor of the wood itself.   Scotland used to buy millions of used Bourbon barrels because, once all of the toast flavor was leached out by the Bourbon, the resulting barrel afforded just the right wood flavor to enhance the already smoky peaty flavor of Scots Whisky.  So, once the Bourbon industry stopped using air dried barrels, the Scottish distilleries had to find a new source of barrels.

Are “Toasted Head Barrel” and “Bourbon Barrel Aged” gimmicks or is there something of value there?  The “head” is the top and bottom of the barrel and staves are the pieces that compose the body of the barrel. The barrels we use do not have toasted heads.  So, our barrels do impart some untoasted flavors into the wine although the surface area of the staves is far greater than that of the heads, so the flavor is more influenced by the heavy toast staves than the untoasted heads.   It would be purely a taste preference to toast the barrel heads and not a right or wrong decision. 

The first thing any book on winemaking will state is that one should never never ever use a used Bourbon barrel for winemaking.   Again, to use them is not a right or wrong decision, but one of taste preference.   The popularity of wines that have been aged in Bourbon barrels shows that apparently it imparts a flavor that many people like.   I’m not one of them, however.

To see barrels made and to get some of the best first hand information about barrel making, Google “McGinnis Wood Products”.   You’ll see some awesome pictures especially the aerial view of the yard where they stack millions and millions of staves drying in the clean upland Missouri air.   Be sure to click on “In the News” “The Making of a Bourbon Barrel” for the best interview I have ever seen on barrel making.   It is short and so informative that I should have simply asked you to watch that video instead of reading my column.  Additionally, once the interview with Jack McGinnis is done, there will be several thumbnail pictures.  Click on the one with Rebecca Dunphy “Scots vs. Irish vs. Bourbon”.   Depending on your browser, you may need to Google “Rebecca Dunphy Scots Wiskey vs Bourbon” to arrive at the video. It is well worth the 3 ½ minutes.

The last time we were in Cuba MO visiting McGinnis, we ate at a great little brewery barbeque place called Missouri Hick BBQ.   The food and beer was great and we learned a new ethnic slur (MoHick) that they proudly use throughout their marketing material.   Apparently, the good folks of the Ozarks loathe being mistaken for rough hewn folks just getting by from other rural areas.

Enjoy in Good Health,                                                                                                      Brian Cain, the Michigan Vintner