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Oaking techniques
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Posted by pepper_newbie (My Page) on Fri, May 4, 07 at 13:53
| Instead of having your nearly-stable wine batch rest in oak barrels, could you get beneficial taste results by using pieces of oak floating in the wine for a couple of months? I just trimmed an oak tree in my back yard and have some good size logs that I could cut into pieces for this purpose if it is a viable way to gain the flavor attributes of oak.
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Follow-Up Postings:
RE: Oaking techniques
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| It should work since many homebrew stores sell oak chips exactly for that purpose. I think that the main thing would be a caution on sterility - to keep any bad things out of your almost finished wine, I'd imagine that you'd have to heat treat green oak in some way, either by steaming the wood or some other method of heating to kill off any unwanted bacteria. I'd also be very careful with the amount you add and taste often since using chips will increase the surface area of the wood exposed to the wine so the flavoring will come on pretty fast. |
RE: Oaking techniques
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| Most of the mass produced cheaper wines do exactly that. You don't want to throw them in green tho, they need to be stacked and weathered for a few years or you'll get terrible tannin. And decide if you want to toast them or not. And remember that "oak" is not all the same. There are different species and not all are used in wine. Good luck. |
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