A delicate oak/wine flavor..

I've never done oak with wine but I have done with bourbon.

If you want delicate, I would use 2ozs in each batch. You can soak them in enough wine to cover them in a Pyrex or other air tight container for a month while the beer is in primary.

As far as the time, I would leave them in for a week, and then taste it every week until you like the taste. I have always found that the oak flavors are intensified as the beer carbonates, so take them out when you feel that the taste is slightly fainter than you want.

Maybe other BA's can chime in about the sanitation. I've never worried about it because soaking in bourbon will sanitize. Not sure if white wine is strong enough to do the trick. The other thing to consider is that the flavor of the wine could be affected by oxidation, so you may not want much headspace in the containers.

Good luck

 

Like all things in brewing, patience is key. You could toss a ton of oak in your beer and have it taste woody in two weeks flat, but you'll get much better results from aging on a lesser amount of oak for a longer period of time. Here are my suggestions:

1. In my opinion, if you're using wood CHIPS and not cubes or staves or whatever, they have a pretty high surface area, so you won't want to add too much, particularly to a light beer. I would suggest 1 oz. of oak chips for a 5 gallon beer, so 1/2 oz. each of red and wine if you're splitting the batch.

2. The amount of time it takes to physically brew the beer (say, 7-14 days) should be enough time for the wood to saturate with wine, particularly because you're using high surface area chips. However, wood has bacteria and other bad stuff in it, and unlike hard liquor, wine isn't strong enough to kill it off, so sanitation is KEY. I would suggest sanitizing a few clamp-top mason jars or Tupperware or some other kind of air-tight container. Boil the wood chips in water for like 10 minutes, strain out the liquid, toss the wood into the mason jar, add enough wine to cover it completely, then let it sit. When you rack your beer to secondary, strain the wood out of the wine, discard the left over liquid (it'll seem like a shame at the time, but if you taste it, it'll be tannic and nasty, you don't want that in your beer) and add just the oak to the beer. If you're careful, you should be able to put it right in and retain all that winey goodness without another step of sanitation being necessary.

3. You'll start to get wine flavors into the beer within 2 weeks, but you won't really start to get WOOD flavors from French oak until 8 weeks or so. By then, it should be good to bottle, though if you could be patient until week 12, it'll be worth it.

Hope that helps!

 

1. I have used 1 oz (IIRC) in several 5 gallon batches of in on 5 gallon batch of biere de garde.
2. Never soaked chips to impart flavors of wine or spirits.
3. Be prepared to taste it perioidcally and stop when you like it, or add more if it is not where you want it to be. You can correct under-oaking (by adding more or extending the time) fairly easily. The only way I can think of to correct over-oaking takes more effort (involves brewing an unoaked dilution batch). In my meads, I went with 2 weeks. In the biere, I put the oaks in during primary fermentation and then removed them during secondary, ao this was probably also about 2 weeks. What I was shooting for with this length of oaking was a slightly tannic astringency that, for me, enhances perception of dryness. I think it is a nice complement to the malty biere de garde.