Pick a barrel.

Now is the time of year when producers, throughout wine country, are fervently preparing for harvest, although there has been a little bit of breathing room this vintage.

The purchasing of new barrels is a major concern for winemakers, and each winery will have a very individualistic barrel protocol. The winery at which I am gainfully employed purchases a butt-load, (that is a technical term), of new French oak barrels, for Chardonnay and Cabernet sauvignon production, from perhaps as many as a dozen different cooperages. Consequently, quite a large number of barrels have been arriving at the winery for the past few weeks; preceded by a passel of barrel salesmen, eager to secure large contracts, bringing with them promotional materials they each hope will curry favour with the winemaker. These promotional materials often include t-shirts, coffee mugs, wine thieves and...toothpicks, French oak toothpicks no less. It could be worse, The Boswell Company could have offered the winemaker a peg leg, or George Washington's false teeth, as a conciliatory gift.

Just add water.

Whatever your feelings are on cork versus screwcaps (or any other new-fangled wine closure), you cannot deny that cork is undoubtedly the most traditional and widely used of all the stoppers that can actually keep wine in a bottle.

A co-worker (who shall hence forth be known as the Marketing Queen) gave me this Grow-A-Tree kit; a bit of marketing fluff from Cork Supply USA touting the "100% natural, renewable, recyclable, and biodegradable" attributes of Quercus suber. One could hardly call their attempt to champion the CO2-chomping cork oak tree as eco-friendly; the kit contains a plastic growing tube, two plastic wrapped acorns, a plastic bag of growing medium, and a plastic bag of perlite. At least the instruction sheet appears to be printed on recycled paper! Oh...and they ask you to kindly recycle the cardboard tube that the plastic, sorry I mean acorns, came in.

Seeing as I already have a few baby cork oaks growing in Vinoland, I am going to plant these two little acorns and watch them grow into mighty bottle-stopper-producers also...if I live to be 100 that is.

From little acorns...

...mighty wine-corks grow.
Since my previous post about oak trees two more have, ahem, fallen over. But please do not think that Vinomaker and I are arboreally antagonistic. On the contrary, we have three baby cork oaks (Quercus suber), purposely propagated from acorns collected from two enormous cork oaks on the grounds of the Napa State Hospital, just waiting to be planted. Of course, they will be planted in an area that will not interfere with our vineyard activities.