Roll out the Canuck Barrels

Domestic oak for aging wine toast of Niagara

By Mark McNeil           The Hamilton Spectator

For years, the Niagara wine industry was over a barrel.

If wineries wanted to age their wine in oak, their only options were barrels from France or the United States.

That was until McMaster University geologist Mike Risk and Hamilton physician Jim Hedges came along with what sounds like the simplest of ideas.

“Why not use Canadian oak trees?”

Now, after years of testing and development by the tow amateur winemakers, the idea has beacome the toast of Niagara.

Dr. Jim Hedges, a heart surgeon and winemaker, samples wine from Canadian oak barrels which he and a colleague developed.

Last year one winery, Lailey Vineyard in Niagara-on-the-Lake, put out 25 cases (250 bottles) of Chardonnay using the Canadian oak barrels supplied by Risk and Hedges’ company Canadian Oak Cooperage.  The wine was quickly sold out and received rave reviews.

Later this year, six Niagara wineries, including Lailey, will release several hundred cases of Canadian Oak Cooperage aged wines.  Word is spreading about the local wood. The inventors say they’re receiving all kinds of calls from vintners who want to jump on the Canuck bandwagon.

It all started five years ago, when Hedges, who works as an assistant heart surgeon, took a walk thought a 40-hectare parcel of land his sister had bought in southern Brantford.

“There were these huge white oak trees that were over mature.  I said, ‘White oak is what they make wine barrels out of.’  I wonder whether our Canadian oak would be just as good.”

He took the idea to Risk, and the two did some research to see whether Canadian white oak had been tried in winemaking.  They couldn’t find any references other than some rumours of it being used experimentally in Germany by a winemaker there.

One issue in Canada was a lock of wine barrel makers.  Risk said there used to be all kinds of them, but the barrels were used for whiskey.

“These days there is no place in Canada that actually makes barrels from scratch except for on operation in Nova Scotia that makes spruce barrels for putting herring in for the tourists. We don’t count that.”

Said Hedges: “We considered making the barrels ourselves. But once we got further into it, we realized it was a lot more of an art as well as a science than we were capable of doing without proper equipment.”

They managed to find a cooper in Arkansas, and wen t to get some barrels made.

 Returning to Hamilton, they used the new barrels for tests. They found wine aged in the Canadian oak - varying number of months depending on the wine - “seemed to impart a flavour similar to French oak. but with different overtones.”

Being scientists, Risk and Hedges decvised a test of the “aqueous extracts of the three major oak types into the Solid State NMR facility at McMaster University and had a series of spectr generated. “All three oaks have different organic compounds; Canadian oak is very similar to American oak, but with strong differences in the range of compounds that resemble vanilla flavour characteristics. In that regard, the Canadian oak was like French oak” their report said.

Derek Barnett,, a winemaker and part-owner of Lailey, said his Canadian oak aged Chardonnay had a taste that was “not quite as aggressive flavoured as he American oak.  It’s more in tune with the French barrel.”

Risk, an amateur winemaker and a professor emeritus at McMaster, said the mellow taste from the domestic wood seems to reflect the stereotypical Canadian personality. ”We’re intermediate. We’re mellow.  We don’t like to offend people.”

Noted Hedges; “It’s probably more a matter of environment.”  American oaks grow in warmer weather and are subject to more insects. Both Hedges and Risk believe the compounds that protect the tree from bugs also give the wine its oak flavour.  “Trees aren’t dumb. They have been around for a hundred million years. They’ve developed these metabolic byproducts to stop insects from chewing  on them.” said Risk.

Even though the American white oak is the same species as the Canadian one, there is absolutely no question that you can tell the difference in taste between Canadian and American oak barrels.” 

Oak barrels are used extensively by Niagara winemakers, with several thousand in use at any one time.  (Each barrel can be used three or four times.)  French and American barrels cost up to $1,000 each.

Canadian Oak Cooperage barrels cost about $850, and are being manufactured in Missouri using oak from the Brantford property and other areas in southern Ontario.

In a country full of trees, why didn’t anyone consider Canadian white oak before?  Risk said that’s because Canadian wineries have tended to imitate wines developed elsewhere, so it was a natural leap for them to use the same barrels as the foreign winemakers.

“I would assume that not one has really thought about it,” said Barnett, a member of the Wine Council of Ontario.

Canadian Oak Copyright 2004