Understanding the difference between French and American barrels can help point you toward bottles you'll enjoy.

Say the word "winery" and many people may envision a cool, dimly lit space filled with wooden barrels - each holding 800 gallons or so - giving the liquid inside time to mellow, develop complexity and ...

Winemakers: To oak or not to oak, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up oak to craft your wine to shake the spheres ...

Bourbon wouldn’t be bourbon without new, charred American oak barrels — that’s actually written into U.S. law, and that’s where bourbon gets its signature flavor and deep amber color. Oak barrels are ...

There’s something about a barrel room in a winery. On the surface, it’s just a giant room filled with a bunch of identical wooden barrels stacked in rows. That alone can be an impressive sight, but ...

If you could make a lot of bourbon whiskey these days, you could be distilling real profits. Bourbon sales in this country are up 36 percent in the past five years. But you'd need new wooden barrels ...

Walk into almost any wine-tasting room on the planet and they will be there: wine barrels. They may be stacked over there by a wall or set on their tails with a piece of glass across the top making ...

CUBA, Mo. — Don McGinnis traces his finger along the top edge of a wooden barrel on the factory floor while a sea of workers around him cut planks of oak, position staves to form a circle, and char ...

Most of the wine we drink comes from grapes grown somewhere in California and harvested in the previous year. It is simple, no-frills stuff that winemakers handle in vast quantities in very large ...