{"id":32,"date":"2026-09-01T10:45:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T10:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/2026\/09\/01\/oak-is-a-seasoning-not-a-flavour\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T10:45:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T10:45:10","slug":"oak-is-a-seasoning-not-a-flavour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/2026\/09\/01\/oak-is-a-seasoning-not-a-flavour\/","title":{"rendered":"Oak Is a Seasoning, Not a Flavour"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Barrels should be felt and not tasted. If the first thing you notice in a glass is oak, we have made a mistake somewhere between the forest and the bottle, and the wine is going to spend the next five years apologising for it.<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What we actually buy<\/h2><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We buy from two coopers, both working French oak, both air-drying their staves for three years before a barrel is built. Air drying is slow and expensive and it is the whole game: kiln-dried oak gives up its tannin all at once and tastes like a plank.<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Toast is a seasoning, not a flavour<\/h2><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A medium toast rounds the mid-palate and adds a little spice. A heavy toast adds coffee and smoke, and it is a very easy thing to fall in love with and a very hard thing to take back out. Our standing order is medium, with a handful of medium-plus barrels each year for the parcels that can carry it.<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">When we get it wrong<\/h2><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It happens. A parcel goes into new oak and comes out three months later smelling like a carpentry shop. The answer is not to bottle it and hope: the wine goes back into older, neutral barrels, sits for another year, and joins the blend at a much smaller percentage than we planned. Nobody tastes the mistake. We just make less of that wine.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Barrels should be felt and not tasted. What we look for when we choose them, and what we do when we get it wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":70,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[24,18],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-cellar","tag-cellar","tag-tasting-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/wine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}