The wine barrel: the main supporting role in the wine cellar

We are winemakers. Or rather: We have spent more than twenty years as facilitators for grapes on their journey from the vineyard to the bottle – learning all the time and always thinking about how to do an even better job. From the very beginning it was clear that, as forest owners, we would make use of that privilege to the benefit of our wine - with barrels made from our own oak trees! That sounds so right – a logical idea and a good feeling.
Once harvested, the grapes undergo a process of transformation, day in day out. Much of that transformation occurs while the wine is at rest, in the self-contained world of the wine barrel. It offers protection, peace and room for development. And it leaves traces in the wine. Let us track those traces.

It was a landmark decision: At Manincor, the wines are fermented exclusively in wood – a logical decision in combination with our commitment to biodynamic husbandry in the vineyard.

Why wood?
In view of the fact that we – as biodynamic vintners – strive to work the land entrusted to our care in the spirit of sustainability and create optimum conditions for the fauna and flora with respect for biodiversity, that we give constant thought to the compatibility of our activities with the needs of nature and that we are in a position to utilize our own resources, the decision to make exclusive use of wood is unassailable logic.

A living product
As biodynamic wine growers, we give thought to every aspect that might influence our product and do everything possible to create ideal conditions for the wine – as visitors to our cellars know.
Wine and its containers enter into a particularly intensive relationship, one that is critical for the quality of the wine.
Our thinking goes like this: Wood is a living material, one that hardly ever reaches the end of its development. (Just think how the old wooden floors in an alpine farmhouse squeak and creak and even groan!) It grows slowly and it takes a long time before the wood can be used. Wood lives on a different time scale to human beings. For decades, the trees extract nutrients from the soil, brave the elements and live through changes in the climate.

Close relationship
Wood has much in common with grapes: Grapes also feed on nutrients in the soil, breathe the air, drink water and absorb sunshine. And they flourish in symbiosis with the wood of the vine.
A wooden barrel is kind to the grapes, lending harmony and balance. It holds and protects, offering space to breathe and develop. Wood and wine have the same rhythm.

Enological aspects
In our view, the right wood for our wine barrels can only be oak. All kinds of wood have been tried; some vintners swear by one sort, some by another. For us, the only thing that matters is the quality.
Oak is a fine-pored wood. It admits just the right amount of oxygen needed for the wine to develop and mature. Oak is both warm and hard; it does not dissolve.
It offers maximum vitality and imparts harmony at the same time. It admits a healthy, balanced interaction between wine and wood. We are working continually to achieve in our wines the perfect relationship between youthfulness and maturity.
Oak imparts the finest nuances of taste to the wine; it is the most noble wood for making wine barrels. Our objective is always to emphasize the fruit and obtain a wine that is both complex and elegant. In wooden barrels, the wine remains open; it is given room to develop. In stainless steel it tends to become harder and more closed.
The age of the barrel can make a big difference to the wine: New oak often releases tannins and so influences the mouthfeel. We use barrels made of slow-growing oak, with a fine pore structure that ensures a more subtle influence on the taste of the wine. We want our Manincor wines to be authentic and preserve all that is inherent in the grapes.

Our white wine barrels
We have tried out various sizes and shapes of barrels and experimented with the thickness of the staves. The result: our white wines are made in oval barrels varying in size between 12 and 25 hectoliters. The oval shape of the barrel supports sediment dynamics that are beneficial for our wines.
Manincor white wines spend between seven and ten months in wood. The oak barrel is where all development takes place: The freshly pressed grape juice goes into the barrel and ferments and matures there into fine wine.
The trickiest phase is fermentation, especially if you rely on the yeasts occurring naturally on the grapes as we do. The wooden barrel, with its pore structure and thermal insulation properties, has advantages in the case of spontaneous fermentation. The natural processes are simply more dynamic in this living medium.
The wines remain on the lees all the time; racking from barrel to barrel is performed just once to remove the gross lees.
Over the years we have increased our stock of white wine barrels and now have a total of 56. That means all our white wines can be vinified in wood.

Our red wine barrels
We ferment our red wines in wooden fermenting casks that are conical in shape. That makes it easier to push the skins down during fermentation. The skins thus remain less compacted, making it possible to gently extract the color and tannins.
As with our white wines, we make use of spontaneous fermentation for all our reds. And again, the wooden barrel delivers an organic element; it is better suited for creating good conditions for the natural, living process of spontaneous fermentation.
Following fermentation, the young wines spend a few weeks in concrete vats before being returned to wood immediately after malolactic fermentation. But this time the barrels are barriques, whose 228 liters make them the ideal size for aging noble red wines.
The result is complex wines that lend clear expression to the terroir. The living quality of the wood enables the wine to reveal its full potential.
Our red wines remain in the barriques for 12–20 months. When first maturity has been reached, we move onto the next step, which is blending. This involves transferring the wine in the barriques to wooden barrels with a volume of up to 6,000 liters, where the wine remains for a few months. From then on, things slow down. Only when the individual portions have combined to form a harmonious finished wine has the time come for bottling.
The aging of the wine can then be completed in the bottle, an extremely slow process that takes place practically without the presence of oxygen. All our wines benefit from a few years of bottle aging and gradually achieve an increasingly complex finesse.

Forest and trees
Our own forest is a resource of which we make careful and sparing use. In planting replacement trees, we are working for future generations. The oaks that are felled to make our barrels are between fifty and eighty years old. Twenty percent of the wood is suitable for making barrels; the rest is firewood.
All the trees we currently use have grown naturally. Our oaks grow within sight of Manincor, on the hill surmounted by Leuchtenburg Castle.
It is winter 2015: After weeks of careful consideration, we have now decided which of our oaks is to be felled this time. On a cold winter morning, with Count Michael looking on, a team of foresters fells the tree in an almost inaccessible location.
Nothing is left to chance: The tree must be of the right age and have grown as straight as possible. It has to be felled during the last waning moon of the year. That is when nature is most completely at rest, when the sap is well and truly down and the plants are collecting their strength. Wood that is cut during that period dries better, retains its integrity and, as a wine barrel, develops elegant nuances of taste.

Turning a tree into a barrel
The felled tree is freed of its branches and debarked. With the right equipment, strong wire ropes and great skill, the foresters extract the tree from the forest.
The trunk is split along the grain, sawn into boards and stacked in our courtyard with plenty of air gaps. There the wood is left to season for three years.
We take storage very seriously and have developed our own system, with the boards stacked with air gaps in a chimney shape. This ensures that every board gets full exposure to the elements: sun, rain, snow and wind.
As a result, all the unwanted bitter components are eliminated from the wood, and the barrels only require a low toast. With all these measures, the objective is to ensure that the wine always remains in charge.
But the wood is not yet fully aged. When the time comes, we take it to Franz Stockinger, the cooper in whom we trust. He knows us and the way we work, and he makes the barrels accordingly. Several times a year he calls at the winery to taste the wines and assess the quality of the barrels in partnership with the wines.
Our other barrel suppliers also visit us for a tasting session at least once a year to help them understand our wines and our philosophy. So we can be sure that our barrels harmonize with our wines and support them in their development, while maintaining a low profile in terms of taste.
The cooper’s work requires perfect craftsmanship. He cuts and planes the staves with a double curve (vertical and horizontal). He employs a metal hoop as a template to join them together and adds additional hoops for stability.
To give the staves the necessary flexibility and also to activate the aroma of the wood, the partially built barrel is placed over an open fire with the loose stave ends at the bottom. At the same time the cooper wets the wood on the outside and draws the staves more and more together with a loop of cable. When the staves also form a perfect circle at the bottom end, another metal hoop is slid into place.
In addition to the size, the order for wine barrels will also specify the desired level of toasting, which is dependent on the heat of the fire to which the staves are exposed. At Manincor we prefer barrels with a low toast.
Finally, the heads (the top and bottom) are added to the barrel and the bung hole cut.
But that will not be the case for some time yet. Franz Stockinger will not be using our 2015 oak harvest until the winter of 2018 at the earliest. There should be enough wood for ten barrels.
Just over 20% of our barriques are made from our own oak. We are very pleased about that: It gives the wine an even more territorial character and helps keep the production cycle more compact and self-enclosed. The other barrels we use come from leading coopers, some of them from France, of course.

Traces of wine
After many years, when our barriques have come to the end of their service life as wine barrels, we use them to make wine shelves or chairs, flower tubs and much else and also, in the last resort, for firewood. The wood naturally bears the marks of its former life: They are wine-red in color!