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36 W i n e s & V i n e s A P R i L 2 0 1 4 C omparisons, sometimes heated, between making wine with oak barrels and making wine with various barrel alternatives— oak staves, micro-ox, etc.— have been thrown around for a couple of decades now. While much dis- agreement is still abroad in the land, a num- ber of things have been definitively established, and it's useful to draw up the balance sheets for both sides. Barrel alternatives clearly have the fol- lowing advantages: • They are far less expensive than barrels. • They can be applied in various stages of winemaking in more precise doses. • They are more flexible than barrels when used as fermentation additives (for color stabilization, etc.). • Several technologies (Flextanks, con- crete eggs, micro-ox among them) offer ways to mimic the slow oxidation/evapora- tion kinetics of barrels, with or without oak adjuncts for flavoring. • Oak barrel alternatives require cutting down far fewer oak trees. Standard barrels, on the other hand, are clearly superior in at least three respects: • They have hundreds of years of tradi- tion on their side. • They look really cool in the winery and in promotional materials. • They can easily be recycled as planters after their useful lives are over. Are barrels obsolete? Or, at the very least, do barrels have the same issues as natural corks: plenty of worthy history, a certain romantic appeal, great results when they work right, but maybe more trouble (and money) than they're worth for the majority of wines? Barrel basics Oak barrels in various forms have proven amazingly useful to the development of the wine industry—as well as the development of the individual wines matured inside them. Despite all the buzz about the back- to-amphorae movement, virtually all pre- mium reds and many whites are aged and/ or fermented in barrel, and in recent years $10 wines have spent at least some time in wooden vessels. This remarkable track record is all the more noteworthy because the adoption of barrels as standard containers had almost nothing to do with the characteristics for which they are valued today. Barrels had multiple advantages over stone wine ves- sels; they were lighter, more portable and far less likely to crack open. The distinctive flat-ended, wide-bellied shape made them easier to roll around and vastly stronger than a wooden wine cube would be. The common shapes and sizes developed hun- dreds of years before anybody knew about Will Barrels go the Way of Floppy Disks? Inquiring Winemaker Highlights • are barrel alternatives on the verge of making traditional oak barrels obsolete? • Oak products, micro-ox and various tank alternatives do a better and better job of reproducing barrel flavor profiles. • most industry observers, however, think barrels still have a place, especially at the high end. t I M P A t t E R S O N The permeable plastic that Flextanks are made of allows oxygen to enter at predictable rates.