Charles Shaw Wines 1117

Cool, I didn't know TJ's had Pinotage. I'll check it out. Yes, Pinotage is a South African grape. It's grown in the U.S. in very few places, one of them Sutter Ridge in Amador County.

Barrels are almost always oak, but oak from different regions imparts different flavors. Also there's a big difference between new oak and old (i.e. re-used) oak barrels.

I agree, some California wines (particularly those from the Russian River valley) are way too oakey for my taste also. A new oak barrel will impart a strong oak flavor, and you need a very intense grape to compensate else you'll taste more wood than wine. Amador County and Paso Robles tend to produce sufficiently intense grapes. Russian River, Napa, and Sonoma do not, in my opinion. Their blander grapes are better suited to OLD oak barrels, from which much of the oak flavor has been leeched out.

Many French and Italian wines are fermented in old oak, which is probably why you prefer them to California wines which likely use newer oak. On the other hand, you NEED newer oak if you have particularly concentrated or intensely-flavored grapes, and small spots of California tend to produce such grapes, whereas Europe generally doesn't (at least in my observation).

All the above refers to small operations, not the big steel-vat operations like Gallo, Paul Mbutton, and other huge wine makers.

(Some wines, both big and small operations, won't use oak at all, but are made totally in stainless steel containers, so you get only the fruit flavor with no balancing wood. You might like those, but I find them a bit one-dimensional.)

I don't like all California wines, but I do like big flavors, and I must admit I haven't found bigger flavors than some California wines (like those I mentioned in my previous reply to you).

-A