Victorwine wrote:Research conducted by World Cooperage a few years back, concluded that using oak powder during fermentation removed vegetal aromas (sulfur related compounds) in red wines. They’re not talking merely masking the vegetal aromas with oak aromas. Just adding a low dosage of oak powder (below sensory threshold) was shown to reduce “green” “vegetable”, “swampy”, and other sulfur related aromas. Somehow because of the pulverized state of the oak powder the sulfur compounds bound or linked up with a constituent of the oak powder. Since oak powder is fairly easy to remove from the wine a significant amount of the sulfur related compounds are also removed.
Ryan, now that you got your “feet wet” (or should I say “hands purple”), you might get “hooked”! Good Luck with your batch of Foch,
Salute
Interesting. The only reason I had considered using oak was to lend the wine a little extra complexity, but like I said, the fruit is too light to handle it. I actually hand sorted the berries one by one (not hard when you've got just enough for a bottle plus a glass one wine), and the under ripe ones didn't so much taste vegetal as the did just plain tart. But, I will definitely keep that trick in mind for the future!