Wood and micro-oxygenation

Micro-oxygenation is a technique that can be used for many purposes when making wine. It is mainly used to age wine artificially. When wines have very much tannins, from oak or because of too much extraction they cannot be drunk within a couple of years. Micro-oxygenation is often used to smoothen those tannins and make them acceptable. Then critics sometimes talk about "velvety", "silky" or "round" tannins... These techniques are well used to make tannic wines drinkable early (St Emilion, Madiran, vins de cepage etc..)

When this technique is used for ageing or smoothing purposes, it is actually very violent for the wine. The wines produced in this way are easily recognizable: they have no "defaults" (round smooth) but no genuine taste either and they are trivial according to my modest opinion. Removing defaults in the wine also removes the essential things.

We tasted last Sunday a bottle from Madiran brought once by may uncle. He now lives in Pau so quite likes Madiran. The wine was supposed to be good as it was a "cuvee speciale", bla-bla... This is the kind of wine elaborated with much technology that had some commercial success recently. I tasted these kinds of wines a couple of times. I was not disappointed: smooth with much tannin and absolutely trivial... Just like tomato ketchup, nobody dislikes but it is not interesting. Fortunately the same day friends brought a Chambolle Musigny village 2006 made by a small producer they know and are used to buying to. It was just another story... No fiction there: a real story. Very subtle and feminine and... unique!

Let me mention another example. Today I cooked beef in wine, a bit like the "coq aux vins" by Yoko. No need to cook it with Gevrey. One can do so, no law again this, but it is a waste: Gevrey is not designed to be cooked. So I bought in a supermarket a cheap bottle of vin de pays d'Oc (south of France) made from Cabernet Sauvignon. One should not cook with poor wines but this one should have been good enough and I was interested in tasting it. The reason is that it is a best seller in France for 2,40 eur. So I needed to know! Uhhhh... this was bad. Again surmatured, articially concentrated (?osmotic techniques to gain concentration?), a bit woody as expected and obviously micro-oxygenation. It was round, sweet but it was still bad and I could hardly drink a full glass. I cooked with it. Actually the two best sellers in volume in Bordeaux wines in France are also very similar to the later wine. No names here. They are of course cheap and really woody, made very mature grape juice and -- I bet -- microoxygenation!

In brief one can make for cheap a successful wine using surmatured grapes, oak and micro-oxygenation. But I think the results are poor.