What's The Cheapest Way To Oak Your Wine?

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shadow47

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I think those Oak chips you can buy are a complete con, £3 for 100 grams of oak!

There must be a cheaper option, where can I get some French Oak? I can then cut up into cubes, toast them myself and then use them for aging the Wine.

Any ideas? :wha:
 
Suppose you could find your own oak sawdust maybe from a local joiner / cabinet maker / sawmill.
Your big problem is going to be finding out if it has been treated with something 'oribble.
 
Find a piece of ntural oak and i could soon turn it to sawdust or chippings

Rob
 
arent the oak chips/dust from the insides of old oak barrels which have had wine or spirit in them?

i think they only get sent to the saw yard as they get old and start to leak/creak and lose their airtightness (is that a word?)
 
I guess it doesn't really matter if it's officially a word or not, as long as people understand the point you were making, that's the main thing. :D

This is how language evolves anyway :cheers:
 
I found an oak tree with a loose branch :whistle: , shaved off the bark and roast it in the oven, just to darken it and kill anything living in it. I think it was about 200 for 15 mins, but you can tell when it is done by the lovely smell. Then the stick went in a bottle of Beaverdale Rioja red. This was good after two months and so I added a few sticks (8g) to a 5ltr PET for two months. Seems to work out ok so far, though I would try it with one bottle first, just to see if you like it more or less oaked. I think the larger amounts of oak/wine need a little longer to mellow but it is more interesting and tastes much more like a true rioja, I found it a little flat to begin with.
 
I'll have to try that gilgamesh, thanks! :)

Just need to walk around and find an oak tree with a 'loose' branch, I'm sure I seen one earlier when I was walking the dog... ;)
 
I am nearly sure on another forum wurzel said about adding vanilla essence as an oak substitute but i could be wrong. :hmm:
 
Endadmcc said:
I am nearly sure on another forum wurzel said about adding vanilla essence as an oak substitute but i could be wrong. :hmm:

That might have been me actually, I remember telling someone that, but I probably copied it from Moley :D.

So unless he verifies it then I'd give it a miss for now.
 
shadow47 said:
Endadmcc said:
I am nearly sure on another forum wurzel said about adding vanilla essence as an oak substitute but i could be wrong. :hmm:
That might have been me actually, I remember telling someone that, but I probably copied it from Moley :D.

So unless he verifies it then I'd give it a miss for now.
I'll verify that Wurzel said it on another forum.

I haven't tried it as we don't paticularly like oaked wines, but if Wurzel says he got that from Tom, that would be good enough for me.
 
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