Wine Barrel

Object Details

Description

This 225 liter (60 gallon) barrel is made of French oak and was used to age red wine at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars (SLWC) in California’s Napa Valley in the mid-1990s. Manufactured by the French cooperage Seguin Moreau, in Merpins, it was one of hundreds stacked in a large storage room, where red wines were aged before SLWC’s cave was completed in 2000.

Cooperage is an integral part of winemaking. Wooden barrels typically hold 50 to 60 gallons of wine, while casks are larger, including some that hold 1,000 gallons. The wooden staves allow a small amount of air to slowly enter the wine, which many believe imparts some desirable flavor and aroma characteristics to the wine as it ages. Before Prohibition, redwood and American oak were typically used for aging wine in California. As the industry was rebuilt after Repeal, California vintners turned to France and experimented with storing their red wines in small oak barrels instead of large casks. They experimented with oak barrels for whites as well, which led to some robustly oaky Chardonnays in the 1980s and 1990s. Many now agree that limiting whites to a few months in oak produces a more desirable result.

While French oak is still preferred among many winemakers, some have found that oak from Hungary or various parts of the United States lend a different but pleasing character to wine.

ID Number

1998.0181.17

accession number

1998.0181

catalog number

1998.0181.17

Object Name

barrel, wine with tracking sheet , bung, and 4 barrel chocks

barrel

Other Terms

barrel, wine with tracking sheet , bung, and 4 barrel chocks; Food Technology; Winemaking

Physical Description

wood, oak (french) (overall material)

metal (overall material)

manufactured (overall production method/technique)

Measurements

overall: 95 cm x 57 cm; 37 13/32 in x 22 7/16 in

See more items in

Work and Industry: Agriculture

Food

FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950-2000

Exhibition

Food: Transforming the American Table

Exhibition Location

National Museum of American History

National Museum of American History

Subject

Wine

Record ID

nmah_1300908

Metadata Usage (text)

CC0

GUID (Link to Original Record)

https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746ab-d87c-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa