Influence of Quercus petraea Liebl. wood structure on the permeation of oxygen through wine barrel staves
Ignacio Nevares, Maria del Alamo-Sanza, Víctor Martínez-Martínez, María Menéndez-Miguélez, Jan Van den Bulcke and Joris Van Acker
Wood Research amd Technology. Holzforschung
Abstract
The anatomical characteristics
of oak wood, which is usually employed for making wine barrels, affect
the properties of the wine, because these characteristics are related to
the chemical compounds that can be potentially transferred to wine
during the aging process. Grain, as the rate of tree growth, is the most
commonly employed parameter to define the quality of the oak wood used
in cooperage. Nevertheless, oxygen is a key factor in this process and
there are few articles that evaluate the oxygen transmission rate (OTR)
of the wood employed in cooperage. This work presents the evaluation of
the anatomical characteristics of the French oak (
Quercus petraea
Liebl.) measured with X-ray computed tomography and the OTR of 267 wood
samples extracted from recently constructed wine barrels. This study
demonstrates that the OTR is dependent on the anatomical features of oak
wood, the first step to classify a natural material as wood for custom
oxygenation barrel making. OTR cannot be determined from the wood grain
or any other single property because it depends on the overall
anatomical characteristics of each wood sample, the grain and the
average earlywood and latewood width being the three parameters with a
stronger correlation with the OTR
