There are two reasons for ageing wine in oak. The first is to extract flavours from the wood. Making barrels involves heating the staves with a naked flame. The more the barrels are "toasted" and the newer they are, the more vanilla and toffee type flavours they give to a wine. Secondly the wine will oxidise in a controlled way. This immediately implies a loss of fruit character, but this is compensated by increased complexity. If the wines are kept in barrel with their yeast lees then we gain even further depth of flavour. Only the best quality white wines at Carsin undergo long-term barrel ageing. The finished wines are rich in fruit, complex, and have good cellaring potential. The high cost of small French oak barrels, about 600 euross, is somewhat prohibitive. Each barrel holds 300 bottles! We currently purchase around 70 new barrels each vintage, but we also use one and two year-old barrels.
Château Carsin has been experimenting with oak from various parts of the world : North America, Costa Rica, Hungary and France (oak from the Nevers, Allier, Tronçais and Vosges forests). Furthermore, different species grow in North America and Europe. Trees in a relatively warm region grow faster resulting in wood with softer fibre and bigger pores.
Accordingly, the oak flavours will be extracted faster. The wine also "breathes" and evaporates more quickly, thus speeding up the entire maturation process.
There are, however, ways of replicating some of the effects of ageing in expensive barrels at only a fraction of the cost. In fact, oak chips are frequently used to flavour wine. Only now the use of oak chips is becoming allowed for our use but we still prefer to only use barrels to introduce the oaky characters into our wines. The main argument in favour of using oak chips is the lower cost and thus an increased commercial advantage. Not being allowed to use chips hinders France's competition with other wine producing countries.
The argument against oak chips is that they betray the wine's natural character. So the question remains: where would such authorizations end? Many Frenchmen believe that you should put wine into oak and not oak into wine!
Even though oak chips enhance the flavour of wines, the absence of slow oxidation provided by traditional barrel ageing, means that they will never have the same complexity.
Oak Barrels For Red Wines
Some Château Carsin reds are a lighter, fruitier style of red Bordeaux. Their structure does not usually warrant ageing in new oak barrels, which would overpower the taste of the wine. For the other, richer and more complex styles a greater amount of new oak barrels are used.
The reasons and procedures for barrel-ageing has already been partly dealt with elsewhere. Ageing in oak slowly oxidizes the wine under controlled conditions giving it complex flavours as well as increasing the amount of tannin in the wine.
In better years, at Château Carsin we use a greater number of new barrels for our red wines. If the barrels are new then we prefer to finish the alcoholic fermentation and/or carry out the malolactic fermentation in them. By doing this we find that the oak flavours and tannins become better integrated with the fruit flavour of the wine. In other cases the barrels are first used for fermenting and/or ageing white wine and are then used for ageing red wine.
