Nobody is more proud of their home state than Texans. So Bending Branch's new wines aged with Texas white oak should find a receptive market.
"I think it's amazing to put 'Texas' on the bottle with Texas grapes," said Tiffany Tobey, sommelier at the Ritz Carlton in Dallas. "Now to put 'Texas white oak' on the bottle too -- if they can establish this, it will really take off."
Bending Branch was chosen as one of WineBusiness Monthly's' Hot Brands of 2024 because of its innovative spirit. The creation of Texas oak chains is typical.
"We're really focusing on Texas-grown fruit, but what about Texas oak? It will just give another layer of Texas terroir," Bending Branch founder Robert Young MD told Wine Business. "It's done in France. They match the different forests to their wines there. Why not here?"
In Texas, white oak grows only in Deep East Texas, a large rural region near the Louisiana border with no cities with a population above 35,000. Stephen F. Austin State University, which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in Forestry, is located there in the city of Nacogdoches. (The school's sports teams are called the Lumberjacks.)
"Oak is grown and used in the US from multiple states: Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri," said Young, known to all as "Dr. Bob." "Because the growing conditions are different, the terroir, the soil and the climate are substantially different in these states. It wouldn't be a surprise that the oak from Texas is different. We're one of the southernmost states that have stands of white oak growing. Where this stand is growing, the weather is hot and muggy with a lot of rainfall. The trees grow a lot faster than they grow up north. They're not going to be as tight-grained as the oaks grown up north."
Young found a hardwood company willing to sell him a few boards that had already aged outside the sawmill for two years. He aged them for another nine months at the winery before shipping them to Oak Solutions in California, which created oak chains with them. Oak chains are squares of toasted oak on a chain that can be lowered into a barrel right through the bung.
Oak Solutions delivered two toast levels: Medium Plus, which after experimentation Young used for the wines, and Plus Plus, which he used just for Bourbon.
The trials were basic: they put small amounts of oak into several wines in 750 ml bottles for two weeks. They ended up choosing three wines for the Texas oak treatment: a Petit Verdot, a Tannat and a red blend called Cowboy Cuvée. Young said these were the biggest and boldest wines they tested. Bending Branch inserted the oak chains into neutral barrels because Young wanted only the Texas oak to deliver taste characteristics.
"One of these chains had the impact of 50% of a new barrel," Young said. "The total impact of the chains was 33% of the effect of new oak barrels. But it's much more sustainable because you use a lot less oak. You save money, you save resources."
Young, a medical doctor, is scientifically oriented: he had Oak Solutions do gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) on the wines.
Young said the Texas oak-aged wines had more than double the 5-methylfurfural, which is perceived as brown sugar, of the control-group wines. They also had three times as much vanillin, and more than twice as much guaiacol, which is perceived as smokey barbecue flavor (you might recognize the name as a component of a smoke taint.)
Given all this, we expected the wines to taste oaky, but they do not. They are, like most of Bending Branch's wines, fruit-driven; you can notice some oak notes in the aroma, but they don't stand out over the fruit.
Young said Bending Branch plans to use Texas oak chains for more wines in the future, and that other wineries at his custom crush operation have already asked about getting some. He is also planning to ask a local vintner, who is building Texas' first cooperage, to make some new barrels out of Texas white oak.
The first three Texas oak-aged wines were released March 29.
Tobey said her customers at the Ritz-Carlton tend to be fans of big Napa Valley Cabernets, and she thinks they'll be very interested in trying the Texas white oak-aged wines.
"People are uberproud of the state, and want everything to be all Texas," Tobey said. Even the wood.