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WI ne MAKI n G Dean Ricker of Skolnik says that wineries came to his company about 15 years ago and got them into the stainless barrel business, which now accounts for several thousand barrels per year and about 8% of Skolnik's work. Custom Metalcraft in Springfield, Mo., says the barrel business has taken off in the past 10 years. In whatever shape and size, with whatever bells and whistles in the way of fittings, stainless barrels have one great advantage over the oak original: They can be cleaned much more thoroughly and much more easily. The inside surfaces of barrels are full of nooks and crannies and hard to get at with even steam or ozone, providing plenty of condos for critters whose role in winemaking is not helpful. Once infested, resanitizing barrels is nearly impos- sible without destroying the usefulness of the barrel. Stainless is happy to get blasted with whatever cleaning agent you prefer, and it can sit empty for months at a time with no danger of becoming a permanent Brett farm. Some producers feature seamless stain- less barrels with no crevices at all inside. Stainless barrels can be used for 20 years or more—far lon- ger than oak barrels, which usually turn into planters after three or four years. Initial costs are roughly comparable to new oak barrels; both options range widely, depending on the number of custom-designed features (stainless) or the prestige of the forest (oak). But over time, stainless is clearly a good investment. And once the barrel is fabricated, it stays fabricated; there's no need to chop down more trees the next year. Depending on how you do the calculation, the metal barrel may be a "greener" option than the plant-based version. But does it age like oak? Besides looking nifty, oak barrels serve two important functions, flavoring and rounding/concentrating. The flavor part (and its fre- quent companion, contributions of oak tannin) is fairly easy to approximate in any kind of container with the judicious use of oak products. Oak adjuncts can do the job in tanks, in non-oak barrels. And for that matter, in entirely neutral oak barrels. Indeed, there is something to be said for the degree of control available by adding oak in bits and pieces: a new barrel will give whatever it gives, which may or may not be exactly what the winemaker had in mind, but a series of smaller, sequential oak alternative addi- tions allows for finer tuning. The other thing barrels do is harder to mimic: the slow dance of oxidation and evaporation that brings a wine's disparate parts together, softens the rough edges, complexifies the aromatics and lets the wine unfold. This effect isn't easy to quantify. Sometimes it's even hard to put in words, but the sacrifice of millions of trees testifies to its power. In this respect, barrels are a little bit like cork stoppers: When they're bad (leaky, infected, TCA-ridden, wildly variable), they're very, very bad, and when they're good, they're very, very good. This x-factor is not high on the list of stainless steel's barrel attributes. A certain amount of oxygen will likely come aboard during racking, topping (if that is ever needed) and sampling. Spe- cialty stopper designers go beyond the standard tri-clover clamp, a thoroughly tight seal, to facilitate tiny but steady oxygen ingress. Evaporation is minimal—either a good or a bad thing, depending on your wine style goals. This reductive tendency makes stainless barrels more popular for white winemaking, during which oxygen is frequently kept at a distance anyway. If your goal is plenty of lees and precious little air, stainless works just fine. But stainless barrels also are getting a try- out with some high-end red wine producers who like the pure fruit streak that stainless barrels can add to a mostly new-oaked wine. 52 Wines & Vines APRiL 201 1