Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Luxury winemakers producing some of the most expensive wine in the world will pay up to $50,000 for a single barrel to age their ...

Napa Valley residents are used to seeing wooden wine barrels: in wine caves, stacked outside warehouses and even cut in half and filled with flowers on neighborhood lawns. Barrels are everywhere in ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. One of the key reasons why bourbon tastes like bourbon is that it’s aged in a charred barrel made from American white oak (quercus ...

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. Not every winery ...

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 ...

Kevin Alker’s family came to New Orleans in 1848 and started a business making oak barrels, which they shipped upriver to whiskey distillers and back to Europe. Generations later, he’s gotten more ...

When it comes to aging bourbon, American oak (Quercus alba) is king. But while American oak barrels account for the vast majority of bourbon aging vessels, their mandatory use is a ...