Susan
Many thanks for such an interesting question.
Traditionally, in the days before stainless steel, red wines were aged in wooden barrels, mostly oak. And iconic wines still are.
So consumers became used to an oaky taste in their wines and associated this taste with quality wines.
But oak barrels are expensive � a French oak cask costs around $700 and can be used for four years.
A top winery will use all new French oak barrels for each vintage. A standard size barrel contains 225 litres and can thus fill 300 standard sized 750ml bottles. Divide $700 by 300 and we find that the just the use of a barrel adds $2.33 to the cost of each bottle of wine.
So we can see that it is impossible that a bottle of 2-Buck Chuck has seen the inside of a barrel, and that inexpensive wines that taste of oak haven�t got it from barrel aging.
One way to get the oaky taste that consumers associate with fine wine is to use oak staves or oak chips.
However the cost of barrels is the same whether the winery is in New York, Italy or Chile.
So I am wondering if the drying taste you are getting from NY wines is because of tannins from oak chips or tannins from other sources.
Tannins in wines come also from stalks and grape seeds. NY and Finger Lakes are at the northern edge of winemaking and if the weather has been not so good in recent vintage and the grapes are not fully ripe the seeds and stalks could be giving more tannin than in a good year.
There are many wineries in Finger Lakes covering all standards and price levels : some do use barrels and some, no doubt, oak chips and staves.
If the problem is found throughout it seems to me that it is more likely to be vintage related. And unripe grapes will offer less full rounded fruit flavours which will emphasis dryness and tannin.
I will be visiting Finger Lakes wineries later this year and if you want to let me know the wineries whose wines you used to like and now find too oaky I will try to find whether they�ve changed their winemaking methods.
