Taking Texas terroir to the next level with Texas white oak-aged wines

PRESS RELEASE

COMFORT, Texas – Building on its foundation of innovation, Bending Branch Winery announces the upcoming release of three new wines aged with Texas white oak. The first winery to ever use Texas white oak as part of its wine aging program, Bending Branch selected this new oak profile to add another layer of Texas terroir to its wines.

“We are committed to making not only the best Texas wines but also to put our own stamp on Texas terroir, innovation and sustainability,” said Dr. Bob Young, Bending Branch Winery co-owner and executive winemaker. “The Texas white oak offers distinct flavor characteristics of spice, caramel and vanilla while also providing a more sustainable approach to oak aging.”

The first wines aged with Texas white oak include:

2021 Texas Cowboy Cuvée Reserve, Newsom Vineyards, Texas High Plains
(a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petite Sirah and Malbec)

• Double Gold – 2025 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition

2020 Tannat Reserve, Tallent Vineyards, Texas Hill Country

• Silver – 2025 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition

2020 Petit Verdot Reserve, Narra Vineyards, Texas High Plains

• Gold – 2025 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition

“We have been working on this project for the past six years to secure the best Texas white oak available and to experiment with different toast levels and aging protocols with a handful of different wines,” Young added. “We will continue to age various wines in Texas white oak and compare it to American, French, Hungarian and other oak barrels to create wines with unique and distinctly Texas flavor profiles.”

The winery worked with an East Texas sawmill to harvest white oak from an East Texas forest and cut it into boards that were seasoned at the sawmill and Bending Branch over two years. Prior to coopering barrels and as a first step, the winery elected to produce Texas oak chains as a sustainable method to age Texas wine. The chains were toasted to different levels by an expert cooperage partner and placed in various neutral oak barrels filled with Texas wines of different varieties based on the results of bench trials.  

Bending Branch Winery, recently named a 2024 Hot Brand by WineBusiness Monthly, is known for its innovation, experimentation and sustainability. It is the only winery with a flash détente machine and it also uses cryo-maceration, both of which extract more polyphenols that are responsible for flavor compounds, tannins and color in wine. Both techniques are highly instrumental in a hot climate like Texas to help deliver phenolic maturity.

Dr. Bob relies on his medical background and UC Davis training to apply modern winemaking techniques to carry out research and experiments to ever improve the quality of Texas wines in the face of increasingly challenging climatic growing conditions.

Bending Branch Winery will release its first three wines aged with Texas white oak at 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 7th at the Tale of Texas Oak Tasting event at Bending Branch Winery. Additional wines and also bourbons aged in Texas white oak are in progress. In 2023, Bending Branch launched two bourbon brands, Bending Branch 1840 and ChickenDuck.

Cryo-Maceration in Winemaking

Happening now in the winery...

Cryo-Maceration – Cryo or CM for short – is a technique we use to improve the extraction of color, flavor, and tannin from the skins of red grapes. Freshly harvested grapes are destemmed, put in half-ton bins, and then taken to the freezer. As the grapes freeze, large, slow-forming ice crystals weaken the cellular structures containing tannin, pigment, and flavor. Once defrosted, the subsequent fermentation can extract about 50% more of these critical compounds than a conventional fermentation without Cryo-Maceration.

Conventional Fermentation – around 20% to 40% extraction

versus

Cryo-Maceration – around 30% to 60% extraction

The first wine in which Bending Branch employed Cryo-Maceration, the Bending Branch Winery 2011 Estate Tannat CM, was awarded Double Gold, Texas Class Champion, Class Champion, and was named Top Texas Wine at the 2014 Houston Rodeo Uncorked! International Wine Competition.

One useful side effect of Cryo-Maceration is that it allows us to defer the fermentation of a portion of our fruit until later in the season when there is more room in the winery and more time in the winemaking schedule.