Silver Oak, What Goes Into a Bottle of Silver Oak? Wine is a subjective, personal experience. Like fine art or music, each person can and will experience wine in a different way. While some find joy in a deep and complex evaluation of wine, most find the key question to evaluate a wine is: Do you like it?
Silver Oak complements winery-owned fruit with grapes from top independent growers throughout the Napa and Alexander Valley appellations, giving the Silver Oak winemaking team access to the highest-caliber fruit to make Cabernet of the finest quality.
Since the early 1970s, Silver Oak has aged their wines exclusively in American oak barrels. Today, the use of American oak continues to be a hallmark of their distinctive Cabernet Sauvignons. To ensure the long-term availability of first-rate American oak barrels, Silver Oak formed a partnership with A & K Cooperage in 2000. Located in Higbee, Missouri, 40 miles north of Columbia, A & K Cooperage is a small, family-owned company that has produced premium barrels for over 30 years. It takes 80 years to grow an American white oak to maturity and another two years to properly age the wood. From there, the wood is toasted to Silver Oak's specifications and handcrafted into a 59-gallon barrel. All in all, the year on a bottle of Silver Oak doesn’t tell the whole story – you’ll want to add at least 82 years to get the true birth date. According to winemaker Daniel Baron, “Silver Oak wines undergo an extensive aging process to achieve their opulent, well-rounded flavors, so the quality of our barrels is essential. The Missouri white oak barrels produced by A & K have the perfect balance of spice and vanilla flavors to enhance the black-fruit characters of our wines.”
A & K Cooperage and Silver Oak Cellars have purchased several hundred acres of American white oak timberland in Missouri. The timber will be harvested at the optimum time to maintain a constant supply of wood for many years to come.
No detail goes overlooked in the pursuit of excellent wine at Silver Oak, and that includes cork quality. Associate Winemaker Christiane Schleussner pioneered the use of the “dry soak” method with a team of researchers from Cork Supply USA, and this method has given Silver Oak one of the lowest cork taint rates on large-format bottles in the wine industry: 0.53% cork taint versus the 4% industry standard.