A leading wine critic has suggested that vintners in Bordeaux and Burgundy are moving away from the taste of oak in their wines.

Traditionally, winemakers in Bordeaux and Burgundy have been keen to put their wines into oak barrels for a year or two prior to bottling to allow them to oxidise slowly and stabilise the flavour, according to Jancis Robinson.

Writing in the Financial Times, Ms Robinson suggests that now fashions and tastes in wine are changing, and describing wine as "oaky" has become "a term of distaste".

As such, many Bordeaux and Burgundy winemakers are moving on from the traditional smaller oak barrels for much larger vessels, reducing the proportion of wine that is in contact with the oak.

Barrel maker Radoux and the Faculty of Oenology at Bordeaux University recently developed an infrared scanning system capable of measuring the precise amount of tannins in a wine.

The system won a gold medal at the Vinetech wine trade fair.