Why does Deerfield age red wine longer than other Wineries?
The short answer is that wine ages better in a barrel than
it does in a bottle.
Most wine drinkers are aware that red wine improves with
age. While this might not always be the case, it is widely believed primarily
because of our experience with French wine. Particularly the better French
wines, those with vintage and appellation designation have long been sold with
the understanding that they require additional bottle aging before they are as
enjoyable as they can be. While very few California wines of the last century
could be represented as improving with age, the best California wines, those
vintage and appellation designated, follow this French model, requiring
additional bottle aging to show their best.
The difference in most modern California wines is that
California winemakers try to make their wines more drinkable when young, even
if they can improve with bottle age, because American’s don’t typically age
wine. Most wine is consumed within hours of when it is purchased. Less than one
percent of all wine sees any additional bottle aging in the cellars of
consumers. This obviously has a disadvantage for the perceived quality of the
California wine being consumed if that wine is known to improve with bottle
age.
To better understand why this is the case and how this
improvement with aging happens, we need to understand what happens during
aging. Wine is a very complex beverage, like no other in the world. It is a complex
suspension of minute solids in a solution of water and alcohol. These solids
are held in suspension by weak electrostatic charges. These solids are made up
of even smaller molecular structures based on carbon chains. These carbon
chains are ultimately what produce everything we like, or dislike about wine.
These molecular structures and the way these molecular complexes interact with
each other, on our palates and our bodies are so complex that we have yet to
fully understand it. There are textbooks and PhD papers written on the subject.
We do know that the carbon chain based molecular structures
change as the wine ages. These changes produce the flavors and aromas we
recognize in the wine we consume. The changes in the molecules are produced by
chemical reactions that rely on oxygen. Carbon chains grow, change, split, and
are constructed using oxygen atoms. Without the oxygen not only do the
desirable reactions not take place but adverse changes can occur, which can
develop off flavors and aromas in the wine and, in fact, ill health affects.
Oxygen is key.
Like so many things in life, oxygen in wine is good in small
doses and bad in large doses. The same oxygen that can create a memorable
experience in a well-aged wine can also make a wine lipid, dead and cooked
tasting, commonly referred to as “oxidized”. A properly aged wine has had a
very slow and measured introduction of oxygen. It take time and the right
conditions to work property and predictably. This is why, at Deerfield, we
still use cork as a stopper. The cork breaths, a few molecules of air at a slow
rate into the wine. Without it, the wine in the bottle will not improve but it
will die. Winemakers like to control the rate of oxygen uptake. In the bottle
we do this by the density and the length of the cork. However, this is not a
lot of control. We have much more control over this process in the barrel than
we do in the bottle.
Barrels breath too. It’s kind of like Velcro, that magic
material that transmits water in only one direction. The barrel stave because
of the liquid seal on the inside produced by the wine, transmits air (oxygen)
one-way as well. The wood also allows some of the alcohol molecules and a bit
of water, which are lightweight, to escape through the wood to the outside.
This causes a reduction in the overall volume of the wine, a slight reduction
in alcohol and a concentration of the flavors in the wine because all those
minute solids that make up the flavor are too large to pass through the wood.
In the barrel, the winemaker can monitor and taste the wine, sometimes stir it,
move it to different barrels, change the conditions or keep them stable all to
better control the slow uptake of oxygen and the concentration of the flavors,
to better age the wine.
There are two caveats. The first is that the wine and the
barrel need to be clean and stabile and free of pathogens and defects. This
cannot be taken lightly. Barrels are made of wood and can become easily
contaminated. Wine is alive and breathing and it loves to grow things in it
that don’t belong. It takes great effort and constant attention by the
winemakers to keep the wine healthy in the barrel and it needs to be healthy in
order to age properly. The second caveat is that all this takes time. What is
easier and less involved is to do what most wineries do, bottle and release the
wine just as soon as you can. Deerfield marches to a different drummer. Our
focus has always been on producing the very best wine available anywhere, and
then keep studying ways to make it better. We think you can taste the
difference and we know you can feel the affects, or lack thereof.
All this effort to make the best wine also includes making
wine that is good for you. We learned that the wine needed to be clean and
stable in order to age a long time in the barrel. This pursuit of cleanliness
and stability produced exciting and unexpected results. We found our wine
didn’t produce headaches, hangovers or allergic reactions. Information on this
is available on our cleanwine.info
website. The extended barrel aging also seems to affect histamine levels. We
think (we are still studying this) this is because what histamines are produced
combine with other elements in the wine that render them nonreactive.
So, what’s the real reason we age our wines longer in the
barrel? It makes better wine. It give you the consumer all the benefits of wine
that is properly aged. Our fans don’t need a big cellar and a fat pocketbook.
We are aging the wine for them, and in a better way than they can do it
themselves. Our fans and our wine club members know the difference and are
willing to pay a higher price for our properly aged wine. They become very
loyal to the brand, not only because the wines are delicious; they are clean,
produce no headaches or allergic reactions. Our motto is, “Clean wine, clear
head.”
