Because it works better than Balsa wood.
Though I prefer (tiger) maple for furniture, cherry is terrific and darkens for a couple of years after being made into furniture into a beautiful patina. In colonial times, cherry was the favorite (and most-used) wood for Connecticut furniture, as the wild cherry trees (not in orchards) were plentiful, particularly in the Hartford area. Maple is a harder wood and more difficult to work with apparently.
Cognac in Oak, Armagnac in Chesnut barrels, I think
Stuart - people named a lot of wood “cherry” that has nothing to do w cherries. Brazilian cherry for example. Has nothing to do with the beauty of the wood though.
In theory you could probably use a lot of American woods for barrels - maple, oak, cherry, apple, birch, walnut, pecan, etc. The mechanical properties of the wood may differ, but I’d be surprised if there were some domestic hardwood that would be completely useless for barrels.
But in reality, a lot of the trees don’t grow fast, straight and easily and if you’re growing cherry or walnut trees for example, you can get more money for the fruits or for selling the wood for furniture. They also don’t grow as large - look at some cherry or apple trees that are 50 years old and comparable oaks. Probably a lot of other woods you could use and the same would be true in Europe, but I’m not as familiar with their trees.
Oak however, is plentiful, grows straight, relatively quickly, and it grows in a number of places. For those reasons, it’s been used for ages for all manner of things, including ship building. French leaders like Louis XIV and Napoleon planted oak forests because France was never a naval power and they wanted it to become one.
Of course, as Paul mentions, the Monitor and the Merrimack ended the age of wood ships. On hearing of it, the British navy cancelled all their orders for new ships, realizing that wood was now history. Napoleon’s forests didn’t go away though, and the wood from Alliers that is so prized for barrels today is a result of those military needs from the old days.
Walnut wouldn’t work unless you could somehow eliminate the strong, rather bitter flavoring it would impart; maybe long outdoors air drying would do the trick, but it might just rot instead. Maple’s pretty stiff and might not bend very well. even with heat. It’s true that apple branches before the trunk grows very tall, but native black cherry growing in the woods can get right up there; I’ve had 12 foot logs almost two feet in diameter, no telling how tall the original trees were.
This year the bourbon people will buy two million barrels.
And they are made from white oak because every other species leaks.
Leonard, my point was that if people started using almost any other kind of wood there would not be enough.
But yes, red oak leaks. And in the USA demand for white oak is shooting prices up.
Somewhere I have US Forestry stats on various hardwoods.
Yikes! Can’t be long before “peak oak” is a hot topic among commodities traders.
Peak oak is here to stay!A friend of mine who has been selling American white oak for forty years told me that when he started to buy logs the minimum diameter was 25 inches…now it is around 13 to 15…On the other hand there is plenty of oak in Europe where hardwood forests have been managed better.
Here so many oak forests get replanted with softwoods, which grow faster.
FYI, Chambers Street sent out an e-mail yesterday advertising some sweet wines from Setubal, Portugal. It said that some of these are aged in mahogany.
The Portuguese used a lot of hardwoods from Brazil for ovals etc. . I would think that the price of this wood would be prohibitive now.