Traditionally oaked, modern Bordeaux wines increasingly adopt fresher flavor profiles

Bordeaux is in many ways the capital of the wine barrel world.

A port city on the Atlantic Coast, Bordeaux is far from France’s other population centers, but surrounded by oak forests of the sort suitable for cooperage, or barrel-making. The region’s reputation for fine wines stretches back for centuries and the very best are always enhanced using what the wine trade refers to as “new oak,” whether they are red, white, or sweet dessert wines.

Which is why it’s such a delightful surprise to find a wine like this one in its ranks: a delicious mid-weight, merlot blend that is 100% unoaked.

Aging wines in oak vessels after fermentation and before bottling has an effect on wine like that of sanding carved wood, smoothing out a wine’s tactile mouthfeel. If any of the barrels used are newly constructed, they can add a different type of polish, buffing up the wine’s aromatics with a lustrous sheen of toasty, faintly spicy flavors.

The time-honored Bordeaux recipe is to age finer wines in small oak barrels, or barriques, where 10% to 50% are brand new each year. This practice has been adopted worldwide because it is so effective in highlighting a wine’s best traits, but also because it can hide flaws and give a gloss of desirability to even poorly made wines. Originally used only for the best wines, the Bordeaux recipe has been increasingly exploited in the past 40 years. Nowadays, lesser wines are routinely steeped with oak chips to simulate the effect of barrels and increase their price point.

As a result of this excessive oak use, more and more winemakers and wine drinkers have tired of the vanilla frosting effect of new oak and are seeking fresher, cleaner-tasting unoaked wines whose flavors remain more true to the grape without sacrificing on quality. This family-owned estate offers a rare example from Bordeaux’s merlot-dominated Right Bank region that combines impeccable winemaking and excellent fruit growing to achieve an unadulterated taste of what Bordeaux can do au naturel. Brisk and dry, it is loaded with flavors of tart red cherries and juicy black plums, with complex, woodsy accents that derive purely from the grape and the terroir, not from the wood of a barrel.

$14.99 12.5% alcohol

PLCB Item #98104

Sale price through May 1 — regularly $16.99.

Also available at these New Jersey stores:

Berkley Fine Wine & Spirits in Clarksboro, $11.49, berkleyfinewine.com; Joe Canal’s in Bellmawr, $12.99, joecanalsbellmawr.com; and Wine Warehouse in Voorhees, $12.99, voorhees.winewarehousenj.com.