A lot of wine is moving to all stainless for tons of practical purposes such as cleaning and sanitizing, only dealing with 1 tank, barrel loss, storage space, etc. They then add sawdust for the wood flavor desired (obviously not your average wood shop leftovers). This has way more surface area as compared to a barrel, leading to a way shorter aging time. Then just hit it with some of the normal clarifiers and filter out the little bit left with the plate filter. Both higher end and lower end wineries do this.
There is a growing trend for amphora/qvevri/ceramic aged wines. Would be interesting to compare. Also wines at least partially aged in concrete tanks.
Many cheap wines are in fact oaked to hell, usually in the form of chips, extracts, etc. because the oak flavour can mask faults or give character to mediocre wines. I use oak shavings in my wine (from grapes from my vineyard) because barrels are a pain to work with.
(People also don't realize how much of the wine sold in stores at even medium price tiers is flavoured and homogenized with the addition of concentrates and other additions. One of the big ones is "MegaPurple(tm)", a colouring and flavouring agent made from Rubired grapes, that is responsible for a lot of the jammy fruity "new world" flavours that people seem to think is representative of "Aussie Shiraz" or "Ripe Zinfandel" or whatever their preference is. It's really just a concentrated grape extract. And extremely popular, and doesn't need to be labelled on the wine because it's made from grapes. It's one way producers can get consistent product year over year.)
This is a big part of why I've shifted to medium to not-quite-high end natural wines, in particular old world.
I always found the mass market wines to be way too oaked and/or sweet for my tastes, and it'd give me headaches. The really nice stuff was too much $$ for me to consume at any regular interval. Stumbled across this niche and it was an epiphany. Obviously not a universal truth but in general I find the stuff I buy now to both taste much better to my palate and not give me headaches. Unless I consume *way* too much, and that's on me.
Yeah, I just make my own wines these days (from my own home grown grapes). Because while the "quality" is not the same, it's a consistently more "authentic" product and I know everything about it and can appreciate it as my own product; and it's "cheap" (sort of), it's fun.
I'd happily believe that the oldest process is likely the ideal, especially combined with my anecdotal evidence that Georgian wine is wonderful stuff, and does not give me a hint of a headache.
Most Georgian wines are not natural or qvevri wines, the vast majority of the production there is stainless steel tank produced wine + barrel aging (for reds) like anywhere else.
The Qvevri wines I've had have always been... interesting. But they're not consistently good.
I wish I had a Qvevri of my own to make wine in. But it'd be difficult in this cold temperate climate where the ground freezes. They'd have to be in a heated shop or buried 3-4 feet deep.
Hey now, there are great wines aged in stainless. And even more aged in concrete. And yet more aged in neutral oak, which has been used so many times it no longer imparts the oak character. If the quercetin -> oak link holds, I would expect it to also appear in lower levels from neutral barrels.
It is or at least was pretty common to hear about flavonols, flavonoids and specifically quercetin in various foods and their purpoted health benefits. Seems we've moved on to other compounds that are not yet known to be ineffective.
So I looked it up
It come from the latin for oak, where it was first isolated. I find it i interesting that red wine is aged in oak barrels.
Therefore, a question to the forum
Does cheap wine, aged in stainless steel barrels, have the same effect?