Over a barrel

Bordeaux-style winemaking with long oak-barrel ageing is starting to look anachronistic. So how did we get here in the first place? Plus: what I've been drinking this week

• Exciting news! Tomorrow sees the launch of my new wine podcast, Get Yourself A Glass, with my good friend, author and Daily Telegraph wine critic, Victoria Moore. It’s our monthly take on the world of wine, bringing you the inside story and our take on the professional tastings, the vineyards and the supermarket shelves. Check it out on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

The gospel of oak: clockwise from top left, the barrel room at Château Talbot, Bordeaux; winemaker Noelia Orts at Viña Emiliana, Colchagua Valley, Chile; winemaker Liam Idzikowski, Danbury Ridge, Essex; Gabriel Frías del Val of Hermanos Frías del Val, Rioja Alavesa

It may have been the effect of a few days exploring Madrid’s wine bars and the current fashion there for fresher Galician wines. But when I arrived shortly after that, last month, at a tasting in London with iconic Catalan producer Torres, the wines’ tannins and barrel influence felt like a step back in time. They’re mostly grippy, oaky reds that need a lot of ageing.

That impression was even stronger earlier this autumn at a tasting by Maisons Marques et Domaines, the high-end importer founded in the 1980s by Champagne Louis Roederer. While their portfolio now includes pricey bottles from producers around the world, the common style across too many of their wines, especially Bordeaux and Tuscan reds, was a hell of a lot of oak. Extended barrel ageing has long been viewed by winemakers, importers and consumers as a mark of quality. I dont think it should be.

Barrels of any size or age perform an important function in maturing wine, allowing tiny quantities of oxygen to get to the liquid, integrating flavours and increasing the wine’s concentration and complexity. Other large vessels – clay amphorae, concrete eggs, ceramic barrels or indeed barrels made from other woods, such as acacia – can all have similar effects. But with the first few uses of a smaller oak barrel (500 litres or less, but especially Bordeaux’s 225-litre barriques), you also get tannins and flavour compounds from the oak itself.

Yet the fact that smaller oak barrels became the yardstick of winemaking quality is largely a historical accident.

Most of Bordeaux’s local red grapes, especially Cabernet Sauvignon, are tannic, especially when grown in what was, until the late twentieth century, a relatively cool maritime climate. They needed time in barrel to tame their tannins. At the same time, Bordeaux’s geographical position helped establish it as a wine-exporting centre from medieval times – an activity best carried out using barrels. Then, with the draining of the Médoc marshes in the seventeenth century and a concentration of British merchants in the city, Bordeaux’s wine trade exploded. It became the model for other wine regions with aspirations to selling quality wines.

So it was that in 1785, a Spanish cleric, Manuel Esteban Quintano Quintano, first visited Bordeaux to get tips on how to improve his own Rioja region’s poor wines. Rioja wine was at the time foot-trodden and fermented underground in clay amphorae: it wasn’t very good and was prone to spoilage. Quintano learnt much from superior French winemaking techniques, for example about the importance of cleaning and the use of sulphur as a preservative. But above all, he brought back the gospel of using small oak barrels for ageing. He successfully began exporting to the Americas in the 1790s and set out his approach in his book, “El método de hacer vino en Burdeos” (The Bordeaux method of making wine).

Although Quintano’s methods were forgotten – things French weren’t popular during Napoleon’s invasion and six savage years of the Peninsula War, 1808-14 – it wasn’t long before Rioja’s winemakers looked north again. In 1850 both Luciano Murrieta y García-Ortiz de Lemoine and D. Guillermo Hurtado de Amézaga y Zubía, the Marqués de Riscal, undeterred by their ridiculously long names, began experimenting with Bordeaux techniques. Murrieta (later made a marqués, the winery continuing under that name to this day) introduced barrels made of cheaper American oak; Riscal hired a French winery manager and experimented with Cabernet Sauvignon before sticking with the local Tempranillo grape. From the 1860s, with the arrival of the railway in Rioja’s winemaking capital of Haro, and the start of French wine’s destruction by phylloxera, they were very successful.

Meanwhile in the 1840s in Italy’s Piemonte, aristocratic landowners are said to have invited French oenologist Louis Oudart to improve the local, sweet Barolo wines (some scholars claim that the modern, dry style was actually invented by an Italian in the 1830s). What is certainly true is that the Piemontese sought to emulate the Bordeaux style, barrel-ageing their own, even-more-tannic Nebbiolo grape. Soon after, Chilean landowners visited Bordeaux with similar ambitions: in 1851, Silvestre Ochagavia Echazarreta planted Chile’s fist Cabernet Sauvignon and other Bordeaux grapes. Two years later, French agronomist Michel Aimé Pouget introduced cuttings of Cab and Malbec in Mendoza, Argentina. Neither country used oak barrels much, however, until the 1980s.

So when Miguel Torres first planted Cabernet Sauvignon in Penedès in 1966, he was in fact following in a long tradition. Nevertheless, it was a bold move in a Spanish wine industry that had become moribund under the (teetotal) fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. Torres aimed for quality by planting French grapes and, from 1970, making wine in a French style: 18 months in new French oak, 225-litre barriques. This is still the style of highly successful flagship cuvée, Mas la Plana. It’s now priced at over £50 [$66/€57] a bottle (I prefer their top Grans Muralles cuvée, from Garnacha and other local grapes, though that too uses a lot of oak – and is much pricier still.)

Around the same time as Torres’s experiment, Italian winemakers in the then-poor Chianti region and elsewhere in Tuscany also began planting Cabernet Sauvignon and using oak barriques: the first such “supertuscan” was Sassicaia’s 1968 vintage. Also in the 1960s, a wave of ambitious Australian producers, led by Penfolds and Wynn’s, started routinely using French barriques. Te Mata estate made a similar move in New Zealand in the early 1980s – and soon winemakers from Portugal to South Africa clambered aboard the Bordeaux oak bandwagon. At a point from the mid-1980s when Bordeaux prices were soaring, it doubtless seemed a smart move for any ambitious winemaker.

Things today look rather different – and not just because of the crisis in Bordeaux. Not only was last spring’s en primeur offer of the 2024 vintage a disaster. At the bottom of the market, demand for supermarket claret has slumped in France, part of a wider crisis of demand for red wine there and elsewhere in the world. Partly this suggests a generational reaction against reds that need years of ageing (I wrote about this here.) But for most wine sales – and 92 per cent of wines bought in the UK are opened within 48 hours of purchase – it’s more about style, with fresher and more fruit-forward reds more in vogue. As Aitor Fernández, winemaker at Telmo Rodriguez’s Pegaso estate in the Sierra de Gredos, told me, there has been a shift in consumer tastes, from “a preference for power, structure and high intensity” to “fluidity, simplicity, subtlety and lower alcohol content”.

Indeed nowhere is the shift in red winemaking styles clear than in Spain. Such was Rioja’s dedication to oak that time in barrel – rather than exactly where the grapes are from as in, say, Burgundy – remains the basis of its classification system, ie Crianza (at least two years old, of which at least a year in oak); Reserva (at least three years old, one year in oak); and Gran Reserva (at least five years old of which two in oak.) Ribera del Duero and other Spanish wine regions imported this odd system wholesale. But now increasing numbers of producers in Ribera and Rioja are rejecting it, simply labelling their wines as “Joven” (ie young – unclassified, in terms of barrel ageing.)

The stylistic shift is clearer elsewhere – because while some Ribera and Rioja producers are using less oak, the vast majority still use at least some barrel ageing. But that’s not the case in some of Spain’s trendiest wine regions. The Sierra de Gredos, west of Madrid, is the standard-bearer for a new style of unoaked Garnacha. On the road in Galicia last week, I don’t think I came across any winemakers using barriques, though many used older, larger 500-litre oak foudres for reds. Even in Priorat, where big, oaky reds were once the trademark, winemakers such as Sara Pérez at Clos Martinet have experimented with the use of larger barrels, concrete and clay amphorae. Terroir al Limit use no oak at all in their Priorats, matured in concrete tanks. Their approach is that “nothing should mask the true character of the soils: not the oak, not the extraction, not the over-ripeness of the grapes.”

As that quote suggests, this is a stylistic trend that has been driven partly by lower-intervention winemaking – and indeed in France, stronghold of the natural wine movement, few such winemakers use oak ageing. But even in more mainstream French winemaking, there is now some openness to new ideas about maturation. At Lea & Sandeman’s Rhône tasting last week, one Gigondas producer told me that she and a group of other young local winemakers were planning a trip to Spain to look at their counterparts’ techniques.

Meanwhile in white wines there has, if anything, been an even clearer shift away from heavy use of oak. It’s most dramatic in Australia’s Chardonnays, which have moved away radically from the big, buttery, oaky wines of the 1980s to far more austere styles with little or no oak ageing. Also, barrels are not cheap, even if you’re not shipping them from the other side of the world: new French oak, 225-litre barriques start at around €900 [£790/$1,040] though can cost half as much again or more, depending on cooperage, the origin of the wood, and specifications.

All of this still leaves plenty of winemakers using those expensive French barrels. And don’t get me wrong: oak-aged wines have their place. Oak remains an intrinsic part of the style of many of the world’s great wines: at the Maisons Marques et Domaines tasting in September, my two top-scoring wines were the lashings-of-oak Supertuscan Ornellaia 2020 and Marqués de Murrieta Gran Reserva 2011. But with the ironic laughter of Luciano Murrieta’s ghost in my ears, I generally seek out fresher styles that have broken free of Bordeaux’s long shadow.

Sunset for oak? 225-litre barriques and a (?) 500-litre foudre outside a winery in Maule, Chile

What I’ve been drinking this week

L’Oratge Garnacha Blanca 2024, Terra Alta – an enjoyable white from Terra Alta, in the south of Catalonia: crisp, dry with a little breadth, herbal notes (Stone, Vine and Sun, £13.25.)

Domaine des Forges “Clos du Papillon” 2023, Savennières – I brought this back from a summer road trip through the Loire in summer 2024. A gorgeous and subtle expression of Chenin Blanc, from a single vineyard: plenty of trademark Chenin acidity but it’s beautifully balanced, with a little weight to it, citrus and apple fruit with an undercurrent of minerality (Waud Handford, £22.96. Christopher Piper Wines have the 2024.)

Stoller Family Estate Pinot Noir 2022, Dundee Hills, Oregon – from one of the US west coast’s prime Pinot Noir areas, this is elegant and lovely: strawberry and cherry fruit with firm acidity but body too, very harmonious, quite long (Tanners, £29 reduced while stocks last.)

• Transparency declaration: the L’Oratge and Stoller wines were free samples.