yea, actually, glad you posted your message.....
Here's my thoughts on the whole situation now that we are about 6 months down the road.....
Split the kit in half, made on 3 gal batch "regular" and the other 3 gal using the "batonage" style. The short answer is it worked great!
But.... (there is always a but at the end).
The Spagnols kit comes with oak powder not chips, so in our inexperience we added the powder as directed and of coarse that meant that when it came time to separate the 2 halves, we were going to have powder in both of them as it was now floating around the fermenter loose and mixed in well with all the lees.
shortening the story, the process was successful, however, when doing this in the future and with my next batch, I would put the oak powder or even chips in a bag so that you can effect the oaking process a little easier. By this I mean you would be able to remove or prolong the oaking of your wine. In my case, I would have had 2 separate Chardonnay's no matter if the batonage treatment worked or not, because the oak was on the 2nd batch for 4 weeks longer then the 1st batch.
It does work and suspending the lees daily gave an instant buttery mouth feel that I wanted, but for me and my taste, the oak is a bit heavy and therefore "covers" the amount of buttery taste that you can sense.
So, be prepared to work with the directions on your kits if you wish to try this, to me, I will do it again, but with knowledge this time! think 1st ... do 2nd, gives yourself an opportunity to keep the wine at the flavour that you wish by bagging your oak, or if you intend to bulk age you can make the splite batches and oak at the bulk aging point.
