In the early part of this century you may have noticed a movement toward low oak and no-oak Chardonnays and other whites. It's not a surprising response to complaints about what have been called the over-oaked wines of the 1990s, those from the new world particular.

If the trend is to play down the oak character it takes us back to fundamentals: why do we barrel age the wine? These days, if oak flavor is the only goal we can save a lot of money and time by using oak chips or installing oak staves in tanks rather than buying barrels. And, given that a 60-gallon French oak barrel is over $1000.00 now, with the weak dollar, there has to be more to consider than just flavor addition.

The birth of the barrel
We believe that the ancient practice of hollowing out trees to build boats gave birth to the idea of bending wood to make barrels. By around 350 B.C. the Celts refined their building techniques to produce a container that was water-tight, could bear the weight of stacking and withstand the stress of being rolled around. It very much resembled barrels, as we know them, today. For over 2000 years the wooden barrel changed very little and was the sturdiest vessel available for shipping oil, grain, salt, pickles, even wine.

It's hard to find any specific turning point but, apparently, the practice of aging wine goes back to the ancients. Before barrels were used, wine was stored in large, two-handled clay containers called amphorae. The Romans were known as great appreciators of aged wines and aged it in the amphorae, and later in wooden containers of various description including some that were called cupa. They even simulated aging by heating or smoking the wine in some cases. A contemporary of Julius Caesar wrote that wine was so valuable that Italian merchants could trade one amphora-full for one slave!

These cupa were probably larger than today's standard wine barrel, but that's the term that was eventually adopted for barrels. It's not hard to imagine that ancient names such as the Latin cupa, French cupals and German kufers, were the origin of today's word, cooper, for a barrel builder.

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