I have come to associate "barrel aged saison" with lambic-like beers. Many's a non-Belgian brewery has turned out beers described as such which had all the joyful sour and oak complexities of geuze. So when I spotted that Ballykilcavan had produced one, I had high hopes.We're not told much else about An Fheoir ("The Grass"), only that Chardonnay barrels were employed, and it's 6% ABV. There's certainly a geuze level of fizz as it pours, with an almost unmanageable amount of foam. The aroma isn't spicy like lambic, but it is interesting, with a hint of Chardonnay's (in)famous butteriness, a dry layer of clean farmyard straw and an odd-but-fun oily coconut waft.
The oak is especially pronounced in the flavour, and it's not subtle. You get lots of vanilla and a generous spread of the butter. The saison has provided a clean and crisp base, but doesn't present much flavour of its own. There's no sourness, not that the brewery said there would be, and only the faintest Belgian-style spicing. After a moment, the wine materialises, tasting fresh and, er, grape-ish, with a fun little twist of Champagne's melba toast in the finish.
In my strictly non-professional opinion, this could have done with some extra ageing, to mellow it out. The loud white-wine oak effect risks turning it a little sickly. It's not sickly, but it's no delicately complex number either. The brewery has two more releases to come, of saisons aged in different Chardonnay barrels. It will be interesting to see if and how they vary. I'd have thought Chardonnay is Chardonnay.
