Oaking Wine With Oak Chips

Man Oaking Wine With Oak ChipsHow do you go about oaking wine with oak chips? What type of oak chip would you recommend using on muscadine wine? I’d like to do a little experimenting. My wine is a combination of red and white muscadine grapes yielding a blush/rose type wine. What type of oak chip, quantity per 6 gallon carboy and length of time to soak would you recommend? Thanks much!

Name: Ed P.
State: Illinois
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Hello Ed,

Nothing wrong with a little experimenting. For me that’s part of what makes wine making so enormously fun.

One thing about oaking wine with oak chips, not all wines will benefit from it. Normally, the wines you would like to add oak chips to are wines with a lot of body. The tannins in the oak will help any excessive proteins in these full-bodied wines to clear out. This will give your wine a little more brilliant color.

The oak chips will also add their own smoothing affect to the wine’s character. A rounding-off of the rough corners, so to speak. Heavier wines tend to be harsher than lighter wine. Oak chips will also add some wood flavors to the wine. Some regard this as giving the wine more complexity. These heavy wines are the ones that you should be thinking about considering what wines to oak.

Looking at this from an experimental standpoint, your best option would be to take off a gallon of the wine and strongly oak it. This could be done by adding about 4 to 8 ounces of oak chips to the gallon for a two or three months. Once this is done you can blend a little/some/or all back into the other 5 gallons based on taste.Shop Toasted Oak Chips

Using this method for oaking your wine with oak chips would give you the most control over the final outcome. The downfall is that you would not want to store 5 gallons of wine in a 6 gallon carboy, so you would need to move the 5 gallons of wine to a 5 gallon carboy during this time. The same holds true for the one gallon sample you will be oaking. Also, you are risking loosing whatever portion of the gallon you do not wish to add back to the wine.

The other method for oaking a wine with oak chips would be add it to the entire 6 gallons of wine, and then taste it along the way to see how it’s doing. Usually, once every 3 or 4 weeks. While this is an easier method, you do run a better risk of ending up with a wine you might not care too much for.

How much of the oak chips you would want to add to the wine can vary. I personally like to use 2 ounces to 5 gallons and let it age out for many months. But others like adding 4 or 6 ounces and age the wine for a shorter period of time.

Without question, I would recommend using toasted oak ships. Plain oak chips are rarely used but still have their place. Whether you use Toasted French oak chips or Toasted American oak chips would not make an incredible difference. Either can produce great results. The main difference between the two is that American oak will add sort of a coconut smoothness to the wine, whereas French oak chips will add more of a vanilla richness. One is not better than the other, it’s more of a matter of which one will work best with the wine at hand. Without tasting your wine, I would suspect you would want to use the American oak chips–just a guess.

Ed, I hope this information about oaking wine with oak chips is what you were looking for. Just realize that oaking a homemade wine with oak chips is something that does not happen overnight, so you will have time to sample the wine and make careful judgments as to when enough is enough.

Happy Winemaking,
Ed Kraus
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Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.

21 thoughts on “Oaking Wine With Oak Chips

  1. Article on Oaking Vino w Oak Chips, How much/How Long.
    Been waiting for this one, it’s a keeper. Good job Ed Kraus.

    • In my country oakwood extract,oakwood powder,oakwood chips not available
      How can i get it?

  2. Dear, Mr. Kraus,

    I am e-mailing from Japan. I always check your Wine Makers Academy, and would like to ask you if it is OK to forward your articles in Wine Makers Academy to my friends in Japan.

    Best regard,

    Yukihiro

  3. Yukihiro, any article or blog post can be shared with anyone you like as long as it is shared in its entirety and with reference to the website source and author.

  4. Hello Ed,
    Last year I was experimenting by adding boiled dry leaves to the blackberry wine must before fermentation. I used blackberry dry leaves for that. The wine became rich in color and tasted like it was kept in a wooden barrel for years. I like it a lot and my friends as well.
    Question: can I use dry blackberry leaves with other fruit wines? Or it will destroy the original flavor?
    Thanks.

    • Walter, I am sorry, we do not have any experience or information to provide about using the dried blackberry leaves in fruit wines.

    • Hi Walter, I live in Central Scotland and just read your post. This is very exiting, please would you let me know approx the weight in grams per gallon you used. Just outside my back garden there is a walkway that runs approx 30 miles and is full of Logan berries and Blackberries,
      Regards,,
      James.

  5. Using and keeping in a refrigerator oak cubes in a certified plastic vegetable container with the wine varietal you wish to oak enables you to add as much “oakiness” as you want to your carboys. My preference is the American oak cubes for my late harvest old vine zin.

  6. I have make vine from California grapes.
    I noticed after filtering, a mont after I have dejuced it, it appears as acidic.
    How i can lower the acidityi in it?
    Many Thanks,
    Slavko

  7. Hi, I have a question. When adding oak chips to wine, it is recommended that the chips be boiled in water for about 10 minutes then added to the wine. My question is, does one adds only the chips or the boiled water too and if so, is it best to let it cool off first to abou room temperature before adding? I ussually add my chips during the second fermentation process, but now want to try this method.
    Thanks in advance.

    • Mario, the directions for our oak chips direct you to drain the water used to boil the chips before adding to the wine. It is recommended that the chips be added to the wine after the fermentation is complete and he wine has had time to clear.

      • Thank you Mr. kraus.
        When you say time to clear, I’m assuming that you mean after degassing and adding Super-Kleer and it’s ready to age before bottling, right?

  8. Mr. Kraus,
    I have a question along a similar line. I am interested in making a chocolate cherry wine. I was wondering if I could instill chocolate notes in my wine by adding Coco Nips in the secondary fermentation.
    What do you think?

  9. might be an interesting experiment to turn a heavily oaked, too oaked, red wine into vinegar

    would the oak add a nice complexity to the vinegar???

    • Farmerjack, even though we do not have any personal experience with adding oak to red wine. There are a lot of articles out there online discussing the benefits of adding oak to red wine.

  10. Ed
    You suggested boiling wood chips. In kits I’ve never seen instructions to boil chips or cubes before adding.
    Wouldn’t boiling extract some of the oils out of the wood? If the purpose of the boil is to steralize, would it be better to “bake” the chips/cubes for a few minutes in an attenpt to retain oils?
    Or soak in a steralizing solution for a few minutes – like using One Step.

  11. Thank you for this article. I will be adding some Oak Chips to a Blueberry wine that is in secondary. My question is how careful do I have to be about potentially oxidizing the wine if I am tasting it regularly to see when to take the oak chips out? I am only making a one gallon batch but the thought of taking off the airlock a few times in order to taste it tends to give me anxiety 😀 But maybe I am over-thinking it?? Thanks much!

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