At the recent second annual Wines & Vines Oak Conference, Celia Welch, a wine maker for more that 30 years, said it is time to embrace oak alternatives such as stainless steel wine barrels.
Welch said that, “the environmental and cost benefits of alternative products should be enough for winemakers to take them seriously. Chips, staves and other barrel alternatives use more of the oak trees harvested for wine aging and also cost far less than new barrels.” Today, winemakers have more options to use oak in a variety of ways rather than just traditional barrels. “We’re missing an opportunity. These alternative products we’re hearing about are really, really good,” she said. Welch’s remarks are notable in that most winemakers for wineries producing high-priced, premium wines rarely talk about their use of alternatives publicly and will typically only say they use them sparingly. It’s common for those in the trade and consumer wine press to describe the use of oak alternatives in a disparaging way such as a mark of poor winemaking or as a way to cover up the flaws of wine made with low-quality fruit. She also recalled how barrel cellars used to be much quieter before they housed the noisy machinery that now provides climate control and other equipment typically accompanied by the blare of music from cellar workers’ radios. Barrel topping often only was marked by the quiet tapping of hammers used to gently loosen wooden bungs from bungholes. “I just remember the sound…there was a romantic quietude to a day of topping in a quiet cellar,” Welch said. The winemaker also remembered reaching into the darkness of barrel racks trying to find those wooden bungs that sometimes became saturated with wine and started to rot, providing a comfy home to fruit fly larvae. “I don’t remember sterilizing those bungs or anyone saying we needed to soak those bungs in really hot water to get them clean,” she said. Welch also asked the audience not to forget the lessons of the 2014 Napa earthquake that toppled barrel stacks at many wineries in the southern half of Napa County. One of those hardest hit was Laird Family Estate, where Welch stores many of her barrels. The earthquake struck at 3:20 a.m., and Welch said if it had come at a different hour, the scene would have been much more devastating than just toppled barrels. “No one would have made it out of that chai alive,” she said. She said winemakers can stack barrels lower, use the latest seismically secure racks or strap the top barrels to their racks so they don’t bounce off and cause other racks to topple. “I don’t want any of us to lose sight of the earthquake we had two years ago,” she said. “Hopefully the point has been hit home well, but we owe it to our colleagues to do everything we can do to keep ourselves, our product and coworkers safe.
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