FABs for FOPs # 7 / 10 : Wood

There are DOCG rules for everything so it should come as no surprise that the wood ageing of the wine is also monitored. However this is one area where there is a lot of room for different interpretations which result in very different styles of Brunello. Wood (i.e. time spent within, size, age and provenance) is at the heart of the contentious division between “modern/international” Brunello and “traditional” Brunello

Producers have to show the exact date that the wines went into wood and the precise exit date. Any interruptions must be accounted for in the wine registers. The current regulations insist on a minimum of two years in wood and the wine can be released on the fifth January after harvest. The original aging time for Brunello, when the DOCG was set out back in 1980 was four years in wood with the same release terms. Over the last thirty years the obligatory time in wood has been halved, chipped away six months at a time, from four to two years.

 Many producers currently exceed the minimum time in wood. Here at Il Palazzone we always give our Brunellos three or even four years in wood, the “traditional” time. In our case this decision is connected with the volume of the barrels we use. We use mostly large Slavonian oak (the comically named “botti” which go from 18 Hl to 50+ Hl) so the ratio of wood:wine is very much weighted towards the wine. Those producers who favour French barriques (225 litres) are more likely to adhere to the minimum 24 months since the extraction is much more pronounced due to the smaller volume of the barrels. There are also producers who use tonneaux (500-700 litre) or a mix of all three, depending on vintage characteristics and/or estate philosophy.

There is no DOCG legislation regarding volume or provenance of the wood so there is a huge variety of sizes and kinds of oak being used in Montalcino (and of course the additional variable of how old the barrels themselves are and how often they are used).

Just for the record, at the very beginning of Brunello, over a hundred years ago, barrels were made from chestnut wood. Marino Colleoni at Sante Marie www.santemarie.it has experimented with chestnut barrels and the results are amazingly tannic but very interesting.

Nowadays everyone in Montalcino uses oak but it may be from France, America or Slavonia with consequential differences in the grain and in the taste/s conferred to the wine. Slavonian (no not Slovenian) oak is from Croatia, from a part of the Danubian plain known as Slavonija. Slavonian oak is famous for making the most long-lived casks.

Not least, we are plagued about whether to adopt US or GB spelling of “aging” or “ageing” in estate literature, not to mention the circular from the Consorzio about seven years ago which suggested replacing the verb “invecchiare” with “affinare” wherever possible. In Italian the latter is considered to be free of the negative implications of ageing. It doesn’t have the same effect in English where we have ageing gracefully and oil and sugar refining but there you go; even the wood lexis is controversial in Montalcino.