In the bad old days of the 1990s and early noughties, when American critics held immense sway over collectors’ tastes and wallets, new oak plus super-ripe fruit were paramount for red wines. Oak was a critical component of the sweet, rich style of top California Chardonnays during this period, too.

Nowadays, trend-setting somms hate those oaky, ripe wines, and the hippest winemakers avoid new oak barrels studiously. If the latter do go near them, they might choose vessels made of older oak that impart very little or no flavor. Or, they find other ways of aging wine: massive barrels called foudres, fuders, or botti, which span 1,000 to 5,000 liters in size; concrete tanks and eggs; terracotta (amphorae, tinajas, or qvevri, depending on their shape and where they come from); and, lately, ceramic spheres. Sometimes, though not often, they use stainless steel.

In some ways, this is a necessary correction. We don’t want our wines tasting too much like wood because, even though some people enjoy that flavor, it gets in the way of terroir. What’s the point in choosing a good vineyard site and working hard to produce good grapes only to iron out the character of the wine by blasting it with new oak?

But, as with any trend in wine – even a correcting one – the pendulum often swings too far. Just because over-oaking is a problem, it doesn’t mean that all oak is bad. Small oak barrels, including new ones, have a role in forming fine wines.

Oak can never truly be “over.” We simply need to be smarter about how we use, think, and talk about it.

Using oak to intentionally impart flavor is a relatively recent development. Originally, winemakers used barrels because they could capably store liquids in an age when stainless steel tanks and plastic didn’t exist. Barrels were practically unbreakable, more robust than terracotta amphorae and much easier to transport.

To make a barrel, you split the wood into thin planks called staves, which are seasoned for two or three years, usually outdoors. Then, you cut them precisely into shape, and assemble them into a barrel with the help of some metal hoops. At this point, you heat your half-constructed barrel over a fire. This makes the staves flexible enough to bend into shape, and subtly chars the wood that will become the barrel’s interior.

The flame-broiled effect, called “toast,” enormously impacts how these barrels affect flavor. (In fact, some winemakers use steam to adjust their staves, so as to avoid “toast.”) Whomever is purchasing this barrel can specify the degree of toast they prefer.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, winemakers realized barrels’ shape, type of oak used, and manner of construction could influence the taste and structure of wine. (Wine barrels are almost always made of oak. Variants composed of chestnut, acacia, or cherry wood exist but are rare.)

By the 1990s, the wine world cottoned to the fact that brand-new barrels add quite a lot of flavor; and, in conjunction with picking grapes super ripe, new barrels can produce sweetly fruited wines with spicy oak. This proved to be a winning combination, quickly seducing the palates of inexperienced wine drinkers.

The major flavor compound wine picks up from new oak is called oak lactone, which smells of coconut and vanilla. (Interestingly, barrels made with American oak impart more flavor because this type of wood has much more lactone in it.) Guaiacol, which smells quite smoky, is another property found in wood. It increases in tandem with higher levels of toasting.

Other properties found in wood include vanillin and furfural, which gives sweet, caramel, and nutty notes. Wood also contains tannins, and these add structure and alter color.

One of the real benefits of barrel-aging is it exposes the wine to small amounts of oxygen in a way that stainless steel tanks cannot. Barrel-aging also means the wine is in steady contact with the dead yeast cells at the bottom of the barrel known as lees. This is especially important for white wines, which are fermented in the barrel, because all the yeast cells will end up at the bottom.

As the yeast cell walls begin to decompose, they release the contents of the cells. These can interact with the wine, adding texture and keeping it fresh by scavenging oxygen.

Because the skins are involved in making red wine, fermenting in a barrel is a bit awkward. The reds usually complete fermentation in an open container on the skins, and then the wine is pressed and put into the barrel for aging. This means the lees aren’t quite as important, because there will be fewer dead yeast cells at the bottom.

Still unconvinced that we need to hang onto our barrels? Consider Burgundy.

Even the hippest somms go weak-kneed over quality red and white Burgundy. They may be disenchanted by Bordeaux, but Burgundy is a place of wine pilgrimage, making terroir-focused wines that, at their best, are peerless examples of elegance and power.

And in every Burgundy cellar, especially those making top wines, you will almost exclusively see small oak barrels.

The best winemakers in Burgundy are skilled proponents of what is known as élevage, which roughly translates as the bringing up of a wine. It’s an incredible skill set, the stuff that truly excellent wines are made of. And barrels are the principal tool of élevage.

Winemakers in Burgundy typically leave reds in small oak barrels in their cellars over winter, and then, in spring, as the cellar warms, the wine within begins its second, malolactic fermentation. The wine then spends more time in barrel until it is stable and clear.

Burgundy’s best whites ferment in the barrel, and then there are decisions about how to manage the lees — to stir or not to stir? — and whether or not to transfer them from one barrel to another in a process called racking. Winemakers also have to determine how long to leave these white wines in barrel.

Whenever international winemakers attempt to make high-end versions of Burgundian wines like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, they use small oak barrels. When you ferment wine in a new barrel, the chemical process can impart certain flavors. The results are much less traditionally “oak-flavored” than if you’d fermented Chardonnay in a steel tank and then transferred it to a barrel.

The contemporary backlash to oak isn’t wrong, it’s just incomplete. Hipster somms have fallen out of love with barrels because of the ways oak aging was ruthlessly abused in the pursuit of spoofy wines. But barrels do have a place in the creation of some of the classic wine styles that even the most discerning wine professionals and enthusiasts know and love.

I am thrilled to see more concrete, terracotta, and large oak in cellars, but I also understand that small oak has a place. In skilled hands it can help fashion amazing wines.

We are certainly allowed to hate excessive oaking, but oak itself isn’t the enemy. Ignorance and bad winemaking are worse for wine than any barrel.

You attend a wine tasting. You nod your head while the winemaker says things like “notes of cherry bark” and “long, silky finish.” You fall in love with a certain bottle and purchase it for a special occasion, only to open it and discover the wine smells… off. Musty, maybe. Some describe it as wet cardboard, wet newspaper, even wet dog. It could mean your wine is “corked.”

Corked wine, also referred to as flawed or tainted wine, is caused by the presence of 2, 4, 6-trichloroanisole, or TCA, a contaminant sometimes found in food and beverages. TCA is produced when chlorine bleach meets wood. Since cork must be cleaned when it’s processed, TCA can get into cork and infect a wine. Though you can’t get sick from drinking corked wine, experts say at least five percent of all wine bottles are contaminated by varying amounts of TCA.

While most people associate it with cork contamination, TCA is a pervasive, insidious compound that can creep into a bottle of Cab during any step in the wine production process, especially before bottling.

It’s not just the cork, Before bottling is where the high occurrence of contamination occurs. It could be broken down into the woods it comes into contact with, the barrel, the wood in the tank, structures in the building, the winemaking materials… Even a screw cap can be corked. A very small amount can infect an entire winery or an entire batch of wine.

There are multiple strains of TCA, each imparting slightly different characteristics, none of them pleasant. One is the wet cardboard characteristic. The other strains will mask or mute a wine’s fruit character, thereby undoing a winemaker’s hard labor.

Cork taint is easier to identify in New World wines that are usually meant to be livelier and more fruit-forward, as opposed to a wine from Bordeaux or Rioja that exudes earthier, funkier flavors.

With cork taint, it takes a lot of times running into a corked wine before you can really start to hone in on what those flavors are.

Wine can possess other flaws, as well, not just from TCA. Wine can oxidize if the bottle is exposed to oxygen through a faulty cork or less-than-ideal storage. It can also be “cooked” when exposed to high temperatures for long periods of time. Flaws can also occur during production, as certain processes impart a funky flavor to wine.

If you’re having an unpleasant experience with a wine you should tell somebody. Once you can identify cork taint and are able to say ‘this wine is flawed,’ versus ‘this wine is not my preference,’ I think that will help. One way to do that, is to simply “drink more.”

Tainted cork has been a problem for ages. The industry has responded with alternate closures, such as the screw cap, glass stoppers, artificial cork, composite cork, and aging in stainless steel as opposed to wood barrels. Corked wine gets returned and refunded along the supply chain, so if you do taste something “off,” you’re doing the business a favor by saying something.

The foam atop a beer head is made up of proteins and sugars in a liquid around a large quantity of gas. Foam is derived from the three major non-water ingredients in beer: malted barley, hops, and yeast. Crucially, trapped within that foam are compounds responsible for beer aroma and, by extension, beer flavor.

“As the foam is slightly dissipating, that’s releasing those compounds toward your nose and allowing you to get a good read on those aromatic compounds,” says Brett Bauer, lead brewer at Idle Hands Craft Ales in Malden, Massachusetts.

Beer judges know that a beer’s aroma can be quick to fade, as those volatile compounds come out of suspension in liquid. Foam or head helps contain some of those compounds, keeping them around longer for your enjoyment.

How much of a head to expect on a beer varies based on beer style. A high-ABV barleywine or acidic Belgian gueuze might not have much of a head at all, while a hefeweizen or American pale ale should boast a noticeable, persistent head. Generally, “one inch of foam tends to be the guideline for a perfect pour,” says Jess Baker, editor-in-chief of craftbeer.com, a publication of the Brewers Association trade group. If you’re pouring a beer yourself, you can maximize your chances for getting a proper head by holding the glass at a 45-degree angle and pouring the beer down the side of the glass until it’s about halfway full, then turning the glass straight up and down and pouring straight into its center.

A proper, mousse-like head atop a beer is considered an important mark of quality if you want to fully appreciate what’s in your glass. But some consumers, perhaps with memories of college keggers still in their head, think any beer foam is a bad thing. 

“Some people looking at that head of beer and they’re like ‘Oh I’ll wait until you fill that glass up,’ like we’re trying to save a couple ounces of beer. Maybe there’s a public perception that they’re not getting what they paid for,” Bauer says. “That’s absolutely not the case. We’re trying to present the beer in the best way possible.”

Baker echoes that sentiment. She says advocating for proper beer pours and good glassware isn’t about trying to impress anyone: “This advice is not to be snobby, but truly to get the best experience the brewer of your beer intended

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I’ll drink easy-going backyard beers out of a can or bottle when the situation’s right, but if I’m trying to fully experience a beer’s flavor, I hope it’s properly poured—with a full head—into a clean glass. And not one shaped like a vase, fishbowl, or hummingbird feeder, either.

Mexican beers

The lowdown: If you’re American, there’s a good chance that the first international beer you drank came from Mexico. Of the top five most popular imported beers in America, three—Corona, Modelo Especial, and Dos Equis Lager—are Mexican, and, taken together, have solidified our southern neighbor’s reputation as a reliable producer of light, easy-drinking beers.

While it’s true that many of Mexico’s major beers are fizzy and pale and great for a hot day on the beach, it’s also true that Mexico—the world’s sixth largest beer producer and the top exporter—produces more varieties of good industrial beer than just about anyplace else on Earth. Were there some sort of craft beer apocalypse and only big breweries survived, Mexico is where you’d want to take shelter.

Mexico has produced fermented drinks of one kind or another since pre-Hispanic days, and beer has been consumed, albeit in limited quantities, since the 16th century. But it wasn’t until the second half of the 19th century, following the short-lived reign of the imported Habsburg Emperor Maximilian I (1864-67), that beer began its Mexican ascendency. Initially advertised as medicine, beer was held up as a clean and modern (read: European and white) alternative to the indigenous brew called pulque, a murky, volatile drink made by open-fermenting agave sap. The famous clear bottle used by Corona, which leaves the hop oils vulnerable to overcooking in the sun and gives the beer its perennially stale smell, was chosen to advertise the drink’s clarity and cleanliness, flavor be damned.

Between the 1860s and 1900, small breweries opened throughout the country, from Cervecería Pacífico in the northwestern state of Sinaloa (1900), to Cervecería Toluca outside Mexico City (1865), to Cervecería Yucateca in the tropical south (1869). Cervecería Modelo launched in Mexico City in 1925 with Modelo Especial and Corona and almost immediately began consolidating its power. Over the years, a long series of acquisitions and mergers has yielded two big players: Cervecería Cuauhtemoc based in the northern city of Monterrey (later Cervecería Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma and now officially Heineken Mexico, though no one calls it that), and Grupo Modelo. Restaurants and cantinas around Mexico will pretty much all have distribution deals with one of these two groups and serve only the beers from that group’s roster.

The taste: Mexico’s industrial beers fall, basically, into one of two groups: clara (pale) or oscura (dark). The vast majority of Mexican beer sold in the U.S., including Corona, Modelo Especial, and Dos Equis (plus Tecate and Pacífico, also in the top 10 imported beers in the U.S.), are in the former category. Though there’s some variation between the claras, they are all light, fizzy, and mild, with little or no bitterness or malt. This is what you think of when you think of Mexican beer.

Darker oscuras have a longer history in Mexico and are largely variations on an old European style known as the Vienna lager, popularized during the ill-fated reign of the Vienna-born Maximilian (Lisa Grimm wrote a great piece on this in 2012 for Serious Eats). Heavier, richer, and maltier than their pale cousins, the oscuras are also far more varied in flavor. Indio, a Cuauhtemoc beer, is often sold as a cerveza oscura, even though its mild flavor differs only slightly from its lighter cousins. Bohemia Obscura, first produced in 1891 and also owned by Cuauhtemoc, is more characteristic of the style: highly aromatic, toasted, and sweet. If malty beers are your thing, this is the one to seek out. Victoria, one of Mexico’s oldest beers, remains the most popular of the oscuras and falls somewhere in the middle, richer than Indio, but milder than Bohemia (it also makes a mean michelada

Possible gateway: Well, Corona, obviously, but once you’ve passed that threshold it’s best not to turn back. Most everyone in Mexico has their favorite national beer based on a range of preferences—flavor profile, but also geography and design.

Until about a decade ago, your choices even in industrial beers were limited by geography. Tecate, Indio, and Pacifico, for instance, were all specific to the north. Montejo and León, produced by Cervecería Yucateca (now part of Modelo), were consumed primarily in the south. Even today, driving through Baja might lead you to believe that Tecate and Pacifico are the most widespread beers in Mexico, while Estrella, also owned by Modelo, is still consumed almost exclusively in the state of Jalisco. In Mexico City, though, there’s little you won’t find somewhere or other.

The geographic divisions started to break down in Mexico City about 12 years ago when Indio introduced the first twist-off lids. Carta Blanca and Superior, two other Cuauhtemoc brands from the north, entered next, followed more recently by brands like Pacífico and Montejo. But even now that just about everything has made its way to the capital, some beers remain more common than others. Of the oscuras, the most common are Victoria, Bohemia Obscura, Indio, Dos Equis Ambar, and Negra Modelo. Of the claras, you’ll most likely be offered Modelo Especial, Pacífico, Bohemia Clara, Corona, or Dos Equis Lager.

Next steps: Since the flavor profiles of these beers don’t vary enormously, the next step mostly amounts to sampling some of the less common industrial beers such as Carta Blanca, Superior, Montejo, and Barrilito. The real advanced 202-level move is to get your hands on Noche Buena, a Vienna-style dark beer produced and distributed by Cuauhtemoc only in the months leading up to Christmas (hence its name, which means Good Night, the term used in Mexico for Christmas Eve, and the traditional Christmas Eve feast in the Philippines).

You’ll understand the deeper purpose of Mexico’s industrial beers—particularly the claras—the first time you drink one as an easy, refreshing palate cleanser between sips of good tequila or mescal.

Talk like an expert: The whole point is that you don’t need to be an expert to drink these beers, and, frankly, to make too much of a fuss about them is to miss the point. Mexico is big on brand loyalty, so the most important thing, really, is to have a favorite. The reasons don’t much matter. It might be because you like the taste. It could also be that you like the label (my favorites, Pacifico and Montejo, are a combination of both). The point is to make a decision and stick to it.

When you go out to eat, ask immediately what beers are available. As the server lists them, you should be able to quickly tell which group they’re selling, so, if you’re feeling cheeky, you can interrupt to ask for your preferred Modelo or Cuauhtemoc brand. Otherwise, you should feel free to stop the sever listing once they get to your favorite. And if all they’ve got is Corona, at least pretend to be disappointed.

If you drink enough red wine, at some point all of it is going to cause teeth stain, but there are red wines that are worse for your teeth than others when it comes to dying your pearly whites a deep purple. Every red wine gets its red color from the pigment in the grape’s skin, but the impact that color has on your teeth gets more intense as you go from lighter-pigmented grapes, like Pinot Noir and Gamay, to darker grapes like Merlot, Cabernet, Malbec, and Syrah. But what really makes a wine stain your teeth isn’t just the darker pigment, it’s also the tannins. Tannins are astringent compounds that don’t just cause your mouth to feel dry; they also help that dark-pigmented wine bind to the proteins on your pretty white teeth. This combination would make Syrah the most likely culprit to give you a purple grill.

If you want to help combat the staining somewhat, eat cheese. The proteins in cheese will create a protective layer of coating over your teeth that the purple pigment will bind to, instead of your pearly whites. And as long as you brush your teeth after a night of drinking, the stain won’t cause any permanent damage. Just be sure not to brush your teeth less than an hour after drinking because the acid in the wine can temporarily weaken your enamel, and brushing too soon means brushing away an important layer of defense that helps prevent your teeth from being permanently stained a lovely purple.

                  written by Adam Teeter