A review of the Binyamina Reserve Unoaked Chardonnay 2011 and the Highland Park Loki 15-year-old single malt Scotch Whisky.
By Joshua E. London and Lou Marmon
Washington Jewish Week May 9, 2013
Last week we noted that a wine’...
A review of the Binyamina Reserve Unoaked Chardonnay 2011 and the Highland Park Loki 15-year-old single malt Scotch Whisky.
By Joshua E. London and Lou Marmon
Washington Jewish Week May 9, 2013
Last week we noted that a wine’s flavors are primarily the result of how and where the grapes are grown coupled with the skill of winemaker, and that wine is essentially free of additives. There are parts of the wine producing world where the nonadditive approach is simply common practice and well-established tradition, while there are other regions where this sort of nonadditive winemaking is actually regulated. Even where regulation prevails, however, there are sometimes stipulated allowances for certain invasive steps and ingredients.
In some regions for example, where grapes develop with low sugar content, the winemakers are permitted to add some sugar to provide more sugar than the grapes can do on their own for the yeast to ferment into alcohol (this is commonly referred to as “chaptalization”).
Another common additive is sulfur dioxide (SO2), generally noted with the slightly alarming all caps, “CONTAINS SULFITES,” on the back of most wine labels. Even though this sounds bad, sulfites are naturally occurring anyway because wine yeasts produce sulfur dioxide during the fermentation process. Indeed, wines with no added sulfites contain anywhere from 6 to 40 parts per million of sulfite already. Additional sulfites are added merely to preserve freshness and stop fermentation in fruits and juices. Sulfite use has been in vogue since Roman times. In modern winemaking, sulfur is used as an antiseptic to kill yeast, bacteria and molds, and sulfur is also used as an antioxidant because it can inhibit enzymes that cause oxidation.
Mostly though, as we noted last week, the most frequent “additive” to wine is simply the use of oak barrels, either as the vessel used for fermentation or, more commonly, as the vessel used for aging the wine. Various types of oak have diverse effects upon the wines. For example, American oak is thought to impart more vanilla flavors into wine as compared to French oak. The interior of the barrels are also “charred” or “toasted” by fire to various degrees by the cooperages, depending on the species of oak and the specifications of the client. It is up to the winemaker to choose the oak type, toast level and duration of contact with the developing wine. Occasionally, in any given harvest (“vintage” in wine-speak), some of the wine may be given, say, medium toasted American oak treatment while other wine might be given lightly toasted French oak treatment, and then all of the barrels will be blended together for the final product. Since oak barrels are expensive, some wineries merely add oak chips or staves of oak barrels to the stainless steel tanks in order to approximate some of the same effects of actual barrel Aegina.
The positive influences of oak are upon the color, body, texture and character of the wines. However it can also be used to mask flaws and, for a while, there was a tendency toward too much oak, resulting in some wines tasting more like twigs than fruit. Not surprisingly the pendulum has shifted. Now there are wines that the consumer had associated with oak-aging that are increasingly being made in stainless steel, with no oak influence at all.
Chardonnay has long been made into noteworthy wines without seeing any wood at all. The advocates of “unoaked” Chardonnays believe that the wood masks the wine and that unoaked more accurately expresses the nuances of the grape. A kosher Israeli example is the Binyamina Reserve Unoaked Chardonnay 2011, a vibrantly flavored wine expressing loads of peach, pineapple, orange and melons on a medium frame with a clean, mineral laced finish.
Spirits-wise, rather than leap headlong into another discussion of oak and whisky we thought we’d return to
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