Summary of Wine Consumption:
- US wine consumption in 2012 = 856,000,000 gallons
- 1 gallon = 3.78 L
- 750 mL per bottle
- 12 bottles per case of wine
- 24 cases to a barrel
This gets somewhere in the vicinity of 15,000,000 barrels per year (thats crazy huh, I never would have guessed). Now the barrels can be reused with some limitations. The limitation probably most important are the flavor enhancements that come from fermenting in contact with the oak.
Wine barrels are created primarily with White Oak, one of our favorite woods, so were intrigued to try and get our hands on some recycled wine barrels or barrel parts called staves. We found our staves thru a supplier out of Napa (we hope to find them more locally in the future). That purple color is actually the 'stain' left by the wine sitting in the barrel. How cool is that!
Found some ideas that we liked and set off to make a few things. First was this table center piece. We glued a few pieces together for the body of the piece, then created some nice feet out of small cutoffs from other projects, created a flat area on the bottom of the staves to mount the feet, sanded and oiled the piece and here we have it!.
On this particular piece we trimmed the barrel ends to give a more contemporary look. See how the 'wine stain' pops out on these. Really nice...
