The mere mention of a wine being oaked, especially white wine, raises the eyebrow of many a wine drinker, followed by polite refusal to even try it. Somewhere in their wine-drinking past they probably tried a heavily wooded and likely aged Chardonnay, leaving them with a dry mouth , "splinters" in their tongue and a lifelong distrust of oak. 

However, if judged right, oak maturing adds structure, flavour and longevity to help create the world's most complex and expensive wines. 

The good news is that wine-making has moved on to a subtle approach where whites are concerned and big oak is used only in reds where the fruit can stand up to it. 

The three main varieties of oak used are French, Hungarian and American. The best French oak is finely grained and imparts less flavour to the wine, adding savoury spice, dark chocolate and roasted coffee. Bordeaux blends and the varieties they consist of usually end up married to French oak, creating something polished, elegant and constantly evolving in the glass like a Constantia Glen Five.

American oak on the other hand has a wider, more open grain, flavouring the wine it interacts with more strongly, and is usually recognisable as coconut, vanilla and sweet spiced. Big-fruited Rhone reds like shiraz and grenache partnered with the bold American oak create unctuous butterscotch red-fruited wines that love rich beefy stews and coldest winter nights. I had a moment like that with Glen Carlou Syrah.

Hungarian oak finds itself somewhere in the middle both in grain and flavour, popping up more often nowadays as winemakers continually push the envelope to match grape and barrel for perfect expression. Years ago Karusa made a viognier that spent a year in new Hungarian barriques and I thought it was the most wondrous thing ever done to viognier.

Barrel sizes vary from the most commonly used 225-litre barrique up to a monstrous 12 000-litre foudre, which drastically changes the ratio of wine to wood with the smaller barrels imparting more flavour than the larger ones. Raw pretty much smells of, well, oak and coconut; the other flavours are created by masterfully toasting the inside of the barrels lightly, medium of heavily. 

This process caramelises the wood sugars creating the aforementioned flavours. Medium toasted barrels seem to strike the balance required by most winemakers and are the most widely used.

Barrels are the most expensive way to use oak, but stafes, blocks and oak chips in various states of toast are also widely used where time and cost are factors. Using heavy toasted oak stafes in red wine making, for instance, can add strong notes of chocolate and coffee and seems to work especially well with pinotage. 

Just like a teabag, every time a barrel is reused or filled it contributes less, so it stands that a third-fill barrel will influence its contents far less than a first-fill. Oak should never be the star of the show, but rather provide the stage for the wine to perform on.

Conrad de Wet sells wine for a living, which came about as a very convenient consequence of him constantly tasting his way towards the next great wine discovery and then thinking and talking about it until no mystery regarding its greatness remains. He opens a bottle of wine with the same enthusiasm as pre-schoolers do their birthday presents. Conrad de Wet, 082 683 4193, dewet.wine@gmail.com, instagram: winebynature.

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