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W i n e s & V i n e s A P R i L 2 0 1 4 39 aging; it is much easier to get a little oxygen into a wine vessel than to allow evapora- tion of ethanol and/or water to escape out. This concentration effect is particularly important in certain spirits, which may spend several years in barrel; Leclerc says the Vivelys R&D team is closing in on a solution for spirits. Several people I spoke with said there may be something special about the shape and size of barrels that is hard to mimic in larger and differently shaped storage formats, though the importance is hard to quantify. We all know (or at least believe) that bottled wine ages differently in larger or smaller bottles. Guillaume de Pracomtal noted that the rounded shape of barrels had two small but significant advantages: at the top, only a very small portion of wine sur- face is exposed to air near the bung; and at the bottom, the curvature makes for com- pact, settled lees that touch less of the wine surface for reds but are easily available for stirring with white wines. By far the most intriguing reason advanced for why barrels are special came from Thomas Leclerc: their randomness. Barrel variation (see "Do You Know What's Inside Your Barrel?" in the March issue of Wines & Vines) guarantees that a bunch of barrels are going to produce a bunch of slightly dif- ferent results, and if you want that in your wine blend style, you're much more likely to get it from barrels than from a single, uniform large tank. Barrels also benefit from a kind of Occam's Razor simplicity: Barrels play all these vari- ous wine-development roles in a single prod- uct, not a combination of four or five. It's hard not to believe that the integration of several functions in one space somehow makes for a more integrated result. The barrel alternatives folks point out that wines made with their techniques have won a ton of medals and held their own in some blind tastings. They assured me that there are some very pricey wines made through alternative means, in whole or in part, though their producers don't make a habit of advertising that fact. (Wineries are oddly selective in what they divulge and don't: The use of concrete tanks is worn as a badge of honor, though Flextanks are kept well out of sight. Go figure.) Everyone agreed that for a huge part of world wine production, barrel alterna- tives make a lot of sense; they meet the expectations of their wine-drinking audiences and in many cases bring out all that can be brought from good-but- not-great grapes. Having the alternatives around gives any winery more tools and options. But where the raw materials of wine are special, when grapes show the potential for complex, long-lived, tran- scendent wines, barrels should be part of the program—at least for now. Which means there probably won't be a glut on the wine barrel planter market any time soon. Tim Patterson is the author of "Home Winemaking for Dummies." He writes about wine and makes his own in Berkeley, Calif. Years of experience as a journalist, combined with a contrarian streak, make him interested in getting to the bottom of wine stories, casting a critical eye on con- ventional wisdom in the process. W I N E M A K I N g PAST For more information contact your sales representative or email us at info@seguinmoreau.com Safe and precise for your fermentation and for your crew. FUTURE "No one has duplicated the slow melding of wood and wine and the slow process of oxidation." —Phil Burton, Barrel Builders