Is it a QPR issue? Performance issue? Flavor?
Or, do some wineries use other types of wood for their barrels?
Acacia is also used to some extent
I have run across the occasional Chestnut and Acacia barrel in Italy.
Redwood used to be common in California. Some odd indigenous wood was being used in Chile when Paul Draper got there. It imparted an odd taste that the locals when used to, but wasn’t suitable for export wines. (He was in South America to create export industries, and he thought Chile capable of producing world class wines since the geology and climate are pretty much a mirror image of California.)
Masi ages a bit of their Amarone in cherry wood, which is blended with other wines aged in oak. Cherry has bigger pores so the wine extracts a bit more flavor from it.
White Oak is one of the few woods that have occluded cellular vessels meaning that the vessels in mature wood will no longer transport water (or any other liquid) up and down the tree. Thus when used in barrels they do not leak whatever liquid is placed in them. Red Oak and other species will leak like a sieve.
I asked this very question last year at cakebread.
He did not have the answer. So i decided to just enjoy the rest of my tasting.
Yup, Wes…that & MarinCnty hot-tubs.
I think the use of redwood was mostly for large tanks & fermentation vessels. Don’t ever recall seeing/hearing about redwood being
used for small oak barrels…but I could be wrong.
Tom
Redwood is not flexible enough to bend into barrel staves.
Yes, some chestnut was used in the Rhone in the old days, as I recall.
You can certainly make barrels out of lots of different woods. For traditional balsamic vinegar, which is aged in barrels smaller than 255 liters, they use cherry, juniper and (if they can find it) mulberry. I can testify for sniffing into those barrels that they impart strong flavors, even when they are decades old. That might be a bit much for wine.
The new facility at Charles Krug Winery is made with the wood from the old redwood tanks. It is quite beautiful…
I was at a microbrewery one time, and they had a cherry beer. The server said no cherries were added. It was only aged a month in a cherry wood barrel, and that imparted a cherry flavor to the beer. It certainly was not a fruit beer like you sometimes find, but definitely had some cherry flavor. Would a cherry wood barrel really do that? I was a little suspicious, but since the beer was not overly fruity…
Also, Greek resinated wines, what do they use? Where does the resinated aspect come from?
Funny, a few of us were just talking about this a couple of days ago. Acacia and chestnut for barrels and redwood for large tanks were the only other woods we came up with.
That wouldn’t surprise me, particular if the barrel was pretty new. I’ve had balsamic vinegars aged primarily in cherry that had a marked fruit flavor when compared to other vinegars from the same producer aged in a mix of other woods. And new oak can give wine a marked oak flavor quite quickly.
Although I’ve seen Chestnut used in France, I always thought that oak was used because it was plentiful and easy to work into barrels (relatively) and its pores were small, leading to limited flavoring from the wood.
But…my guess is that if you really delve into it, it is more “tradition” that nobody gives a second thought to at this point.
In some years the Bedrock Kick Ranch Sauvignon Blanc has been partially raised in Acacia.
Correct, as explained in detail here: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/NR/rdonlyres/173729E4-C734-486A-AD16-778678B3E1CF/73970/WoodenCooperage.pdf
Funny, I feel that way about oak. ![[stirthepothal.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f40faec63ca1018898a40805efbf9f0066a3d205.gif "[stirthepothal.gif]"){kind=small}
Some other woods I have seen have been alternated with oak staves to give a mixed barrel. An easier technique I have seen is that the barrel ends to be of different wood and the barrel staves to be of oak. Sometimes this can be done with different oaks as well.
So they add some pine wood into the must. So it’s not from the barrel.