Wines & Vines

42 WINES&VINES February 2018 OAK BARRELS To order your glasses, conTacT aTPgrouP/sTÖzle glassware aT (707) 836-6840 or email sTÖlzle@aTPgrouP.com atpgroup Decorated Stölzle glassware for $2.40. Yes, just $2.40. * Stölzle Weinland Stölzle Universal *The $2.40 price is available only with a 192-piece minimum order for single-placement and single-stock, color screen-print decoration and applies only to the Weinland and Universal range of glasses. Set up and new artwork fees are waived for all new artwork. On sale now through March 15, 2018. (For plain Weinland and Universal glassware, contact us. Additional discounts may apply.) on page 41. The five barrels with the lowest scores are identified only by toast information and the letter assigned to each in the trial. The scoring reveals the subjec- tive nature of barrel tasting. A barrel that received the low- weighted score of 12 also received four "would buy" votes and two "maybes" from the tasters. It was the four "would not" votes that caused it to suffer in the final tally. That particular barrel was de- scribed by one taster as having "integrated tannins," "good feel and fruit expression with good finish." Yet another person de- scribed it as "slightly raw wood, unbalanced" and "thin with un- pleasant tannins." A few months after the tasting, Schweiger said he was struck by how well the ETS spider graphs seemed to line up with the attri- butes of the barrels he preferred. The tasting also confirmed his evolution of thinking on medium and medium-plus toasts. "If you look at the spider plots for the medium-plus barrels, you defi- nitely saw a greater contribution to the wine in terms of enhancing the wine without obliterating it," he said. "Whereas the medium barrels just had less vanillin and contributed less to the winemak- ing process." Schweiger said he "used to be afraid" of medium-plus and heavy toasts because he didn't want any heavy-handed oak notes dominat- ing his wine. "What I really saw was that we were just getting more complexity of tannin, com- plexity of the mouthfeel, so I shifted my orders. I used to do about 50 to 50 medium and me- dium-plus, and now I'm pretty much moving to medium-plus, just because I'm not seeing the value for me in the mediums." While the trial essentially con- firmed his preference for the top- performing barrels, Schweiger said he is considering adding a few more to his program. That's still somewhat of a risk, because there's the ever-present question of consistency. "We like to say, 'I like this barrel, I'm going to order TOP THREE BARRELS n Reference n Transaud M n Gamba G7 MT+ n Sylvain M+T 5-methyl- furfural 4-methyl- guaiacol eugenol + isoeugenol 50% 100% 150% 200% 250% 300% guaiacol furfural vanillin trans-oak lactone cis-oak lactone c l ove sp i c e s m o k e c h a r s w ee t / b utt e rsc o tc h fr e s h o a k / coc o n u t v a n ill a After the tasting, the barrel samples underwent oak aroma analysis by ETS Laboratories. Here are the top three barrels compared to a reference, which was an average of all the barrels.

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