Tong No. 8: Oak
Tong
phone order only
There’s a lot of soft talk and wild stories about oak. Oak remains an intricate subject in winemaking, and there seem to exist a lot of mysteries. Does oxygen penetrate the wood and diffuses into the wine or not, making it softer? Can new oak barrels be contaminated with TCA, causing a corky taint in wine? And so on. Although the influence of oak on wine, like during fermentation, looks very mysterious and intriguing, the opposite is true. Scientists have studied the matter very thoroughly and many aspects of the interplay have been explained in detail. In this issue we try to give a compilation of what has been studied about oak, from the planting of a forest over seasoning, toasting and maturation of wine to trying to link a specific barrel to a specific grape variety. $40.
Phone order only. Please contact us to ask about availability.