Quercus Clowns
If there is any justice in this world, some day the government will require winemakers to label a varietal wine “Quercus Robur” and in smaller letters, “Grapes added for flavor.”
Quercus robur is the Latin name for a French oak tree.
It is the flavor of barrels made from these trees that I am finding in such profusion in wines these days. The wood flavor is so dominant in so many wines that it’s almost rare when a wine tastes like grapes.
Call me old-fashioned, but if a wine is made from decent fruit, that is what I’d like to experience, not some tree.
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The use of oak flavoring for wine is not new, but it has become a near-obsession for many in the California wine trade. The notion that oak--notably barrels whose innards have been slightly charred--is an essential part of fine wine is fostered by a few powerful wine writers who like this smell and taste.
This only encourages winemakers to pander to the tastes of these people and make wines that are ever oakier. One example: the 1985 Groth Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon “Reserve” was an extremely oaky wine that received high marks from some wine reviewers.
Soon after, a Napa Valley winemaker complained to me: “Hey, if you guys like that kind of thing, I can do it too. You want oak? You’ll get oak. It’s a lot cheaper than grapes.”
By the late 1980s, the practice of over-oaking wines began to infect Europe, even to the finest producers. In the last few vintages I have noted that Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, tasted on release, has been more oaky than young Moutons I recall from the 1970s.
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Granted, Mouton is a powerfully built wine that needs years--often decades--to become great, and whether this apparent trend toward more oak flavor will be a detriment down the road remains to be seen.
As I see it, the problem with oak is most egregious in fine-quality white wines. Most of these wines are not made for aging. In particular, Chardonnays, white Burgundies, and now even Sauvignon Blancs are routinely being dumped into new French oak barrels and left to absorb enough of the barrels’ smells to obliterate the delicate nuances of character that should be a part of the wine’s essential offering.
The worst examples are wines that carry the word “reserve” on their label and cost $15 or more a bottle. More often than not, the same winery’s regular, “non-reserve” bottling of the same grape variety is a better wine. (My guess is that winemakers figure if they’re going to charge more for a wine, it has to have more oak to justify the higher price.)
Tasting through literally hundreds of white wines this year on a double-blind basis, I have found any number of high-priced wines that were too oaky. Were they bad? No, not if you like oak. But I prefer varietal character, and as the late winemaker Andre Tchelistcheff said, “If you taste the oak, it’s not wine.”
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Chardonnay has become such a sledge hammer in terms of oak flavoring that I can’t bear to drink many of them, which has driven me (happily) to Sauvignon Blanc. Unfortunately, even here the oak jockeys are at it.
The following wines once might have been at the top of anyone’s list of great Sauvignon Blancs. Today they smell more like a sawmill:
* 1993 Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc “Reserve” ($14.50)--Sweet honeyed scents with a toasty note, more like a dessert wine than a serious table wine.
* 1993 Kendall-Jackson Winery Sauvignon Blanc “Proprietor’s Grand Reserve” ($14)--More smoke and butterscotch than fruit.
* 1993 Matanzas Creek Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc ($13.75)--Fresh melons and spice, but the oaky nuttiness dominates.
* 1993 Signorello Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc “Reserve” ($17)--Mostly oak flavors, little if any fruit.
* 1993 Murphy-Goode Fume Blanc “Reserve” ($16)--Pretty hard to know what grape made this wine, there is so much smoke in the aroma.
Don’t get me wrong, I like oak flavoring when it is but a nuance, a trace to round out an otherwise fruity and complete wine. But there are far too few of these wines.
One wine that has this nuance as well as grand, complete Sauvignon Blanc fruit character is 1993 Napa Ridge ($4). You may think I’m kidding. A $4 wine is better than a $17 wine? Look, I tasted these wines double-blind. I tasted them a second time days later to verify what I was tasting, and the Napa Ridge wine is more definitively a Sauvignon Blanc than any of the five prior wines.
The same goes for 1993 Sauvignon Blancs from Canyon Road ($6), Seghesio ($7.50), J. Pedroncelli ($7.50), Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s ($9.50) and a dozen more.