Lecture 13: Barrel Background (Barrel #1)
Let’s roll out the barrel now and learn much more about this particular wooden vessel that plays such a huge role in wine production. Content covered: Barrel history from the Celts to California; standard barrel sizes; barrel production; barrel uses in the wine industry.
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Video Transcript
Okay, it's time to roll out the barrel now and learn much much much more about this particular
vessel that plays such a critical role in wine production in today's world and has for a couple of millennium.
First, if you haven't done this, you need to go watch the
short video on wine barrel construction.
It's linked right here and in the notes below so that you understand the
technology and the awesomeness that goes into the construction of every one of these
vessels that we're going to elaborate on a bit more. Press pause and go watch that now.
Okay, welcome back.
Boy, that was brief, right?
It's making it brief.
Now that you know the awesomeness that goes into every barrel, how it's exactly done,
understand this right from the get-go too. The technology really hasn't changed for a couple thousand years.
That's the mark of a good technology. Can't really be improved upon. And let's figure out now how it came to be.
How is it that barrels have come to be used in wine production
when they initially were not created for wine production.
Let's do a brief history of the barrel from the Celts to California.
And of course, anytime I use the word brief, hunker down,
it's probably going to be an hour or two.
No, I'll try to keep this seriously a little bit brief.
Now, the idea of a barrel that is taking wood and constructing it,
shaping it, doing something to it in order for it to hold stuff,
namely liquid, the idea has probably been around for a long time.
There are references, references to barrels being used in ancient Mesopotamia.
5, 6, 7,000 years ago.
Made from palm wood to float, probably wine, down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
down to the megacities and empire centers of ancient Mesopotamia.
However, there's not a lot of archaeological evidence because,
you know,
barrels are made out of wood and wood decomposes so there wouldn't be a lot of evidence left after several thousand years of something like
a wood barrel anyway. However, there's not a lot of
references. The references are sparse. Barrels probably existed, but were not widely used back in ancient Mesopotamia.
However, people would have been thinking about it because they would have in ancient Mesopotamia
put that barrel on a boat
to sail it down the rivers, right?
And if you stop and consider both of these things for a second,
both barrels and ships are extremely similar.
They're wooden constructions that hold liquids either in or out.
It's basically the same idea.
In the terms of a ship, you want to build a vessel that holds water out.
So you can sit in it, load cargo in it, and float on it.
In the case of barrels, it's the same type of construction, but you want to hold something in.
Ah, so from a technological perspective very similar and both the barrel, wooden barrel, and wooden ships have really
evolved out over
thousands of years and have been used as a primary device for movement of things and people for many thousands of years.
Now,
both peaked at some point in their production and use and
and have kind of both gone away.
I mean, who uses wooden boats in today's world?
Who uses wooden barrels to ship stuff?
Who uses wooden barrels at all?
