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Corks and drinking on the job
French oak barrel furniture
As
the owner/winemaker at Tantara Winery (one of two), I have had many
opportunities for direct experience with the world of wine and I keep
copious notes which someday I hope to organize into a Tantara Memoir.
Since I have this Calavira website separate from Tantara's
website, I can begin this organizing process. Tantara.com is devoted
to commerce (along with a bit of confetti throwing), so for wine sales,
that's the place to go.
This site is devoted to writing and photography
(you can buy books here). It is my personal observation
and rumination space where I jot down some of my accumulated observations.
The logic you will find is sound. The science and historical facts are
accurate -- at least for the moment. New facts have a way of replacing
old facts and yet we still give them the respect of being factual. Philosophers
tell us we have two ways of knowing what we know - authority or experience.
I've found that the latter quite often trumps the former.
One of the
best things about being in the wine business is that you have to drink
on the job in the pursuit of a quality product. Doesn't get much better
than that, does it? Although I suppose the same could be said for any
of the arts (and winemaking is to my way of thinking more art than science).
Painters get to paint, musicians get to play their instruments, writers
get to fanaticize while pecking away on keyboards and chefs get to nibble.
One of the worst thing about the wine business is that after you've put
your heart, hopes and energies into making the best possible wine (about
a two year investment from grape harvest to bottle release) you're dependent
upon a piece of wood from Portugal (a cork, basically a fishing bob) to
secure all that time and wine. Nothing against Portugal mind you (they
account for only about only 50% of the corks anyhow), but if we can get
men to the moon then why can't we safely seal a bottle of wine any better
than we did back in the 1600 or 1700 hundreds when corks were first used
to stopper the first glass wine bottles? *
Drinking fine wine right out of the barrel (with the aid of a 'wine thief')
is a treat I enjoy sharing with visitors to the winery. Not only do you
experience the evolving wine but you also taste it before it's affected
by bottling. I can only hope that drinking it out of the bottle will be
as good an experience. The wine eventually needs to be separated from
contact with the oak barrel and spend some quality time improving in a
neutral environment, like a glass bottle where it develops "bottle
bouquet." But the wine is still in contact with wood - that cork.
And corks are not inert. Most corks are fairly taste and odor free but
far too many do impart flavors that can slightly affect the wine or completely
ruin it (trichloroanisole taint). Estimates of TCA cork taint run from
2% to 10%. Some claim they run as high as 15%. (With closures like that
goatskins deserve a reappraisal.) TCA is detectable at 1 part per trillion.
That's one drip in 13 million gallons!
The quality of corks began to deteriorate back in the mid 1980's as more
wineries came on line and one big major producer (Gallo) switched from
screw caps to cork and put such a production burden on the cork suppliers
that they (this is conjecture) began stripping that bark down too close
to the ground thus allowing for mold to get into the cork.
Now there are some good things to say about corks. The carbon footprint
is as cute as baby shoes dangling from the rear view mirror. You don't
have to cut the tree down, just peel away that bark every nine years or
so. (Wonder if the virgin cork was better?) All those cork trees are taking
the carbon dioxide out of the air and giving us oxygen and providing habitats
for wildlife.
More positives: Wood just doesn't get any more elastic than cork. Cork
is filled with air (thus fishing floats), and nearly impermeable and with
a high friction surface. Jam it into a bottle and it stays there. Corks
are recyclable, biodegradable and they allow for micro-oxygenation that
helps wines mature with dignity.
Given all that, corks are pretty good. But the second place horse was
pretty good too. He only finished half a length back. Which is where corks
are - half a length back.
They're serviceable, but there's no wine collector who hasn't sunk into
the depths of despondency after opening that special bottle he'd been
anticipating for twenty years only to find it smelling like the wet cardboard.
Options: Well, there are synthetic corks. But do some chemicals for plastics
leach out into the wine? At a pH of 3.15 (some whites) wines are probably
acidic enough to work on that plastic. Are we going to be told ten years
from now that science has discovered that synthetic corks leak minute
quantities of dimetachloromessusup? Not enough to cause physical harm
of course (according to the FDA) but enough to think about when you wake
up at 3:00 am counting all those bottles you've consumed that had synthetic
corks. Furthermore, they are not biodegradable and they're so firm they
often allow too much oxygen permeation around the edges.
So thank goodness for screwcaps. Okay, so their carbon footprint comes
down hard on nature but they seal that wine in tight. Maybe too tight.
There have been some reduction problems (hints of hydrogen sulfide) with
screwcaps. They seem fine for white wines consumed within a year or two
from bottling but those tannins in red wines just might need a minute
amount of good old oxygen micro-seeping in.
A few wineries are experimenting with a glass stopper that seals with
an inert O ring.
If the O ring can allow the micro-oxygenation like a cork then we might
be onto something. Glass is recyclable and better to have glass in contact
with the wine with only that inert (as far as we know) O ring to wonder
about. Glass stoppers would create a challenge on the bottling line but
if we can put those men on the moon ….
* I have never been able to nail down a specific date for the first use
of corks in glass bottles. The cork tree is native to the Mediterranean
region and corks were, reportedly, used as closures for clay jars and
amphorae dating back to 500 BC. Another typical Mediterranean closure
was olive oil that was floated on the surface of the wine to form a seal
against oxidation.
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Good
French oak wine barrels are ridiculously expensive. They are among
the many things that 
keep
wineries unprofitable and wine prices high. The barrels, costing just
over $1,000 each + shipping, are an essential component in making fine
wine. Can't do without them. But their useful life is often far too short.
Some last two years, a few last eight or nine years. They will either
spring non-repairable leaks or they develop aroma problems. The slightest
hint of ethyl acetate (airplane glue) or acetobacter (vine
gar)
or any unpleasant odor that won't wash out will render the barrels too
risky for aging precious wine. So what todo with all those expertly coopered
French oak barrels hailing from some of the best forests in France? Cut
in half for planters? Hardly so--that wood is too beautiful. I bring the
barrels home from the winery, take 
them
apart and with the carpentry skill of Sergio Rossas, we make furniture.
