FIGURE 7. Oak waste in barrel production. French oak forsts are two hundred years old when they are cut down for barrel production. Of the prime wood, 75% goes unused for wine simply because it cannot be employed in building barrels. Why cut these trees down at four times the necessary rate?

      SCORING THE SUBLIME

      To paraphrase Forrest Gump, a barrel is like a box of chocolates: you just never know what you’re gonna get. The innate variability in oak forests, even within a single tree (south side vs. north side, high vs. low), is staggering. An exhaustive French government-funded study by INRA in the mid ’90s documented vast inconsistency in wood composition everywhere they looked.

      The point was hammered home at a seminar on oak held at California State University Fresno in 2001. First, Jeff Cohen, then at Rosenblum Cellars, treated us to a book of splendid prose from his own hand, comprising one-page sensory descriptions of twenty-seven cooperage house styles, an extremely well articulated and perceptive guide.

      The next talk featured Steve Pessagno, who stated disarmingly that he would be more comfortable with barrel alternatives if only he knew what he was doing. Meanwhile, he said, he could get all the complexity he desired from the variability in Seguin Moreau’s medium toast. If he filled fifty barrels with Cabernet, he could expect after a year to select ten for reserve, ten to dump on the bulk market, and the rest would become his regular bottling, imbued with far more nuance and complexity than he could ever intentionally bring about.

      This is not very good news for the guy who only has six barrels. And for the vast barrel warehouses at Mondavi Woodbridge, Bronco, and any number of other behemoths, averaging has taken the place of the human attention that might be given the same wine in tank. The barrel evokes a powerful symbol of artisanality for the wine lover, but in large operations, small cooperage utterly removes the winemaker from intimate knowledge of the wine that a tank would provide. But barrels look really cool.

      THE GLORIOUS STAVE, THE HUMBLE CHIP

      Full disclosure: I used to sell Oenodev’s chips, and I still love them. But what I really longed for was to sell staves. So sexy. The oak alternatives halfway house, stacked inside a tank but otherwise just like barrels, right? I begged my French colleagues to make them. They would love to, they said, if not for the unfortunate fact (as they explained in that patient, diplomatic way all Frenchmen have) that staves are very stupid.

      The biggest challenge confronting winemakers and oak vendors is the problem of reliable consistency. One sample won’t tell you much, because products vary from lot to lot. Jeff Cohen’s treatise is precious because it reflects decades of experience from which he extracted an average profile for each cooper, albeit an ideal to which no single barrel actually conforms.

      A piece of wood as big as a stave, my French colleagues instructed me, can never be produced consistently. Sure enough, I remember once unloading a truckload of hundreds of staves, stacking them in two identical tanks, and filling each with the same Merlot for micro-oxygenation. One tank took 35 ml/L/month for three weeks; the other took 75 ml for six weeks. Subtracting whatever the oxygen uptake might have been from the Merlot’s native tannin, that’s a lot of difference. I saw their point.

      Why do we use staves? Americans cling to several myths.

      Myth #1: Staves are split along the grain and have no exposed end grain, which in chips imparts a planky harshness. But if you look at oak under a microscope, you can see that it has lots of rays—tubes that run perpendicular to the grain. Tannins are extracted much more readily through these rays than through endgrain. That planky dryness we want to avoid arises from poor wood selection, inadequate air drying, or inconsistent toasting, not from exposed end grain.

      Myth #2: Staves, like barrels, have a toast gradient that adds complexity. The reality is that the untoasted interior of a stave imparts a green pithiness at just the wrong moment, just as occurs in barrels. It would be so much better if the toast were in the interior and the green wood on the inside surface, exposed to the young wine, which can better handle it. This isn’t possible, so the best we can do is to use small chips and introduce the various toast levels in the order we desire rather than be restricted by considerations that dictate the building of a container.

      Myth #3: Toast fixes color during fermentation. ’Taint so. Anthocyanins are not fixed by aldehydes unless oxygen is present, which is never the case during fermentation. If they were, the high concentration of aldehyde in fermentation would fix everything. But that doesn’t happen. What fermentation does cause is an amplification of the barbecue furfurals to the level of Worcestershire sauce. Ugh. Toasted staves contribute no copigmentation cofactors or antioxidative ellagitannins to fermentations.

      Myth #4: Staves replicate the complexity of cooperage at lower cost. In reality, when the cooper builds a fire inside the barrel to make the wood pliable for bending, barrel complexity arises from the differing heat zones that result from the varied distances from the fire that surfaces lie. The traditional use of untoasted heads adds sweetness and tannin. Stave manufacture, which is done in temperature-controlled ovens, in no way resembles coopering.

      The lowly chip is the perfect format for blending to achieve consistency. It allows toasting in