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Barrels of red wine maturing in the cellars of a château in Bordeaux.Caroline Blumberg/Reuters

The question

What does it mean when a label says a wine was "partly matured in 30-per-cent new oak and partly in stainless?" How can oak be 30-per-cent new?

The answer

It means that 30 per cent of the wooden barrels used in the maturation process were made of so-called virgin, or previously unused, oak. This is to distinguish them from used barrels, sometimes called second-fill or third-fill barrels, depending on how many times they've been used before.

In the cellar, winemakers like to control the degree to which oak influences flavour, often by deploying a combination of new and used barrels. Newly coopered barrels impart a much stronger character to wine, often in the form of vanilla from the wood fibres, astringency from the oak's tannins and smoke or espresso coffee from the barrel charring or "toasting" process. Used barrels, on the other hand, are much more muted because their flavour-imparting compounds have largely been drawn out by previous wines. They are prized more for their ability to soften texture through the slow interaction with air through the wood's microscopic pores.

That 30-per-cent recipe is common to both red wines and to chardonnay, where a combination of vanilla and toastiness with creamy texture can provide fetching accents to a full-bodied wine's underlying fruitiness. That said, certain big, ripe reds and even a few pinot noirs and chardonnays can tolerate as much as 100-per-cent new oak and still taste balanced. Still others, like many reds from the southern Rhône Valley in France, rely entirely on used barrels or even much larger casks to keep the fruit more or less pure.

There's another way to minimize oak influence, as the quotation that you cite would indicate. Frequently, wines are separated into batches, with some liquid going into barrel and the rest into stainless-steel tanks, which are completely neutral and which can be kept cool with refrigeration so as to preserve fruity freshness. After the specified maturation period, the batches are "married" together prior to bottling.

E-mail your wine and spirits questions to Beppi Crosariol. Look for answers to select questions to appear in the Wine & Spirits newsletter and on The Globe and Mail website.

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