Barrel Fermenting White Wine: It’s Not Just About Oak

(PalatePress) - 

Today, most wine is fermented in stainless-steel tanks. Very clean, very modern, very industrial. Very congruent with the food processing industry and it’s (sometimes reassuring, sometimes disturbing) obsession with sleek, sanitizable surfaces. Stainless steel only debuted in winemaking circa the 1950’s, but it’s now ubiquitous. So, of course, there are folks – including some white wine experimenters in Oregon’s Willamette Valley – looking back to see what we can do without it. I recently found myself tasting a few examples on my way through the area and they stood out enough that I wanted to know why.

Call it hipsterish, call it retro or anachronistic, but the barrel fermentation movement is about what attentive craft winemaking is so often about in this post-Davis, post-Cornell, post-Australian Wine Research Institute era: now that contemporary science has made it relatively easy to make clean, fault-free wine, what can we salvage from the old ways to make wine that is not only fault-free but beautiful and expressive? Not surprising, then, that I ran into a rather generous selection of barrel ferments on my recent all-too-short visit to a few Willamette Valley wineries. I can always count on my fellow Oregonians to be at the front of anti-industrial experimentation. Neo-barrel fermentation is hardly new, but it still stands out in a sea of stainless.

There are plenty of practical time-and-money considerations surrounding barrel ferments, even with white wines where figuring out what to do about skin contact isn’t usually an issue. But let’s imagine for a moment that we live in a fairy-tale world where all cleaning happens by magic and money sprouts from grapevines in the spring. Barrels can be ordered to scrub themselves, wineries buy as many barrels as they need, and winemakers devise ingenious ways to cool them so that labor, lot size, and temperature control aren’t limiting factors. In reality, choosing what and when to barrel ferment can have as much to do with managing the physical barrels as anything else.