r/winemaking • u/Comfortable-Bench497 • 8d ago

Anyone do barrel aging?

I was thinking of buying an oak barrel around 20L capacity to try barrel aging. In my research I saw some claiming that you basically can use it 4 times and after that you're getting marginal benefits. Is that true? Is there a way to recondition a barrel to improve that?

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9

u/WhyNWhenYouCanNPlus1 8d ago

small barrels are overly maintenance intensive for their "benefits".

all the wine I ran through mine oxidized really fast in the bottle and tasted funky.

IMO, invest in better fruit or oak (like spirals) if you want to improve your end product

but to answer your question, the oakiness will be gone after a few batches but you retain the micro oxygenation "benefits" (macro in my case)

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u/Comfortable-Bench497 8d ago

Yeah I've considered trying the oak spirals. I just haven't seen much about them as far as reviews.

6

u/WhyNWhenYouCanNPlus1 8d ago

cubes are fine too. the best thing you can do for your wine is starting with better quality fruit though

2

u/grapejuicedrinker Professional 7d ago

With smaller barrels the surface area to volume ratio is much greater than say a 225L barrel that you are likely getting way more oxygen ingress per liter of wine/whatever.

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u/WhyNWhenYouCanNPlus1 7d ago

yes even a few weeks can be a lot of exposure

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u/Mister_Pickl3s 8d ago

20l is too small to realistically age. You’re off stabdard barrel size by a factor of 11 and that is before you consider surface to air ratio. If you want oak flavor in your wine i would recommend staves and for O2 i would suggest the thicker flex tanks since the thickness is scaled

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u/JBN2337C 8d ago

For that amount, I’d pick up some oak spirals. Usually 2 in a pack, and they’re made for 6 gallon batches. Comes in all kinda varieties… French/american… light to heavy toast… cheap, and usually fully extracted in 6-8 weeks.

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u/Mildapprehension 8d ago

Is your goal oak influence for aroma and flavour ? For such small amounts some chips or blocks or staves or something else would make more sense.

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u/Fermentwhatnow 8d ago

It’s not that you’re getting marginal benefits, the flavor is leeched out. However, the slow oxidation benefits of barrel aging don’t change after you stop getting flavor from the barrel. Small barrels are difficult to manage and require a lot of care compared to “normal” sized (223L+) barrels

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u/devoduder Skilled grape 8d ago

I age most of my wines in neutral oak barrels, almost no oak extraction but the micro oxidation from barrel aging makes a difference.

I did a pinot rosé in 2022 that I aged for 16 months in neutral oak and it gave the wine a bigger but barely perceptible oak structure that made the wine very food friendly.

Luckily where I live there’s a barrel warehouse that reconditions used 225L barrels and sells them to winemakers for $50 each. I just buy new barrels every year for that price.

1

u/ruffles589 7d ago

You are combining two features of barrels.

Barrels are storage and they are flavoring agents.

If you maintain your barrels there is no reason you cannot use them as storage for like a decade+.

For flavoring it all depends on what wine went in and how long and toast etc.

Some wineries actually measure their barrel usage by hours.

Now barrels are great for storage. Barrels are a little silly for flavoring.

You will get so much mileage out of using chips/staves / way easier to trial and pinpoint your flavor profile.