Wood & Wine

The Question Andrew Jefford Is Asking

In the March 2026 issue of Decanter, Andrew Jefford, perhaps the finest wine essayist writing in English today, and the freshly named 2026 IMW Lifetime Achievement Award recipient: returns to one of wine's oldest arguments. Where are we with wine and oak? His question is not rhetorical. It opens into a genuine reckoning about the role of the barrel in the making of great wine.

Jefford traces the century's arc: the early 2000s and their heady lashings of new oak, the fashion for "200% new oak" that gave ambitious reds a heavily wrought, almost architectural quality, and then the backlash that followed. Since 2000, he observes, oak has been in retreat: steel, concrete, fired clay, all the alternatives have been ascendant. The barrel had become associated less with terroir and more with winemaker intervention.

And yet the barrel endures. Jefford circles back to why: the clean, topped-up barrel allows discreet oxygen exchange without oxidative or acetic spoilage. Small, young barrels bring more flavour and oxygen exchange than large, old tuns. The question is not whether to use wood, but how, and with what restraint, and from what source. At Westcott, we have been asking exactly that question since our first vintage, and the answer has always pointed toward Burgundy.

The Chemistry of Oak, Dr. Jamie Goode

Dr. Jamie Goode, author of The Science of Wine: From Vine to Glass and one of the most authoritative scientific voices in contemporary wine writing, draws a distinction that every serious winemaker understands but few consumers ever hear: barrel ageing and barrel fermentation are fundamentally different processes. Ageing in barrel is passive, the wine rests, oxygen seeps in slowly through the stave walls, tannins soften, aromatics develop. It is transformation through patience.

Barrel fermentation is something else entirely. When wild yeast ferments Chardonnay inside an oak barrel, the yeast and the wood enter into a direct biochemical conversation. The yeast consumes the oak's own compounds as part of its metabolic activity, and in doing so transforms them, producing flavour molecules that neither the grape nor the wood could generate alone. The creamy, biscuity, nutty complexity that defines great barrel-fermented Chardonnay is not oak flavour added to wine. It is a new substance created by the encounter between living yeast and living wood.

Three things happen during barrel fermentation that cannot be replicated by ageing in barrel after the fact. First, the yeast biomass absorbs vanillin directly from the wood, metabolising it into less assertive compounds, which is why barrel-fermented Chardonnay rarely tastes overtly oaky despite months of wood contact. Second, the oak's ellagitannins actively limit the formation of reductive sulphur compounds during fermentation, producing wines of greater aromatic purity and freshness. Third, as the yeast cells die and autolyse on the lees, their cellular contents, polysaccharides, mannoproteins, bind with the oak's own tannin structures, creating the seamless textural integration that makes great Chardonnay feel like a single, indivisible substance rather than a wine with wood added to it.

This is why oak chips, oak staves, and other oak alternatives can approximate the flavour signature of barrel ageing but cannot reproduce the wine that barrel fermentation produces. The flavour compounds can be mimicked. The biochemistry cannot. You need the living yeast inside the living wood, from the very beginning of fermentation, and that is precisely what Casey Kulczyk and the Westcott cellar team create with every Chardonnay vintage.

From Forest to Cooperage, The Terroir of Oak

The forests of central France are, in a very real sense, the beginning of the conversation about fine wine. Just as a vineyard's geology shapes its fruit, the geology of an oak forest shapes its wood. In the great forests of the Allier, the Nièvre, the Vosges and beyond, silica-clay soils and dense planting force the trees to grow slowly upward rather than outward, producing wood of famously tight grain. Each ring of growth is narrow. The resulting staves are dense, permeable in a measured way, and relatively low in aggressive tannins, ideal for wines of finesse.

The Tronçais, a government-owned forest in the heart of the Allier commissioned by Colbert in 1670 to supply oak for Louis XIV's naval fleet, is perhaps the most celebrated of all. Its centuries of careful management have yielded trees of exceptional quality, prized for what Tonnellerie Rousseau describes as their natural buttery, creamy expression and light vanilla notes, exactly the profile that defines great Chardonnay from Burgundy, and the same profile we seek for Westcott Chardonnay from the Twenty Mile Bench.

Grain tightness and forest provenance are the two axes along which great coopers work. Burgundian cooperages have traditionally emphasised individual forest origins; Bordeaux cooperages have tended toward blending forests and focusing on grain uniformity. Westcott works exclusively with Burgundian cooperages, which reflects our winemaking philosophy: specificity over generalisation, the individual forest over the anonymous blend.

Westcott's Cooperage Partners

Our winemaker Casey Kulczyk works closely with a curated selection of Burgundy's leading cooperages. Each brings a distinct signature to the wine, a particular hand in the toasting, a preferred forest, a house style in the way oak and wine are brought into conversation. The selection is deliberate and the dialogue ongoing, vintage by vintage.

It would be a mistake to think of these as interchangeable sources. Each cooperage maintains long-term relationships with specific forests, seasons its staves for a minimum of 24–36 months outdoors (longer seasoning removes aggressive tannins and harsh compounds, yielding wood of more refined character), and applies its own toasting protocols. The barrel that arrives in our cellar is already a carefully considered object before it ever meets our wine.

Inside the Westcott Cellar

Numbers tell part of the story. At any given time, Westcott holds more than 350 barrels in our underground cellar, each a standard 225-litre Burgundy barrel, each sourced from the cooperages above, each selected for a specific wine and a specific purpose.

Each barrel passes through the cellar three times before retirement. In its first vintage it contributes the most, the greatest flavour extraction, the strongest oak imprint. In its second, the contribution becomes subtler, more textural than aromatic. In its third, the barrel functions primarily as a vessel of controlled oxygenation and lees contact, its flavour contribution near-neutral. This three-cycle philosophy is the standard of serious winemaking: the pursuit of complexity through layering, not domination through new oak alone.

For Chardonnay, our estate's signature variety, the barrel is both fermentation vessel and ageing vessel. Wild yeast fermentation begins in barrel, lees are stirred at intervals through the winter months, and the wine remains in oak through its full malolactic conversion. The interaction between yeast, lees, and wood during fermentation produces entirely different chemistry than simple barrel ageing: lower concentrations of vanillin (the yeast biomass absorbs it), more complex lees-derived character, and the integration of oak tannins into the wine's structural matrix at the molecular level.