Commercially red wine is aged in large oak barrels which hol

Commercially, red wine is aged in large oak barrels which hold about 0.225 cubic meters (60 gallons or so) of wine each. During the aging process, some of the oak flavor molecules diffuse from the barrel to the wine, enhancing (but not overpowering) its flavor. Non-commercial winemaking has been growing in popularity for the last several years, but the average home winemaker will only make about 0.02 m^3 (5 or 6 gallons) of wine at a time. In response, some barrel makers (also called coopers) began to manufacture miniature oak barrels so that the homemade wine could be aged. However, the wine aged in these barrels was terrible-it tasted like an oak tree! Can you explain why this is?

Solution

In the first case, where the red wine is aged in a large oak barrels which hold about 60 gallons or so of wine each, even though the oak flavor molecules from the barrel diffuse into the wine, it doesn\'t overpower the wine flavor. 0.225m³ of wine will have really large number of molecules compared with the number of wine molecules in 0.02 m³. A liter of wine will have molecules in excess of 10²³ - 10²⁵. Thus, even if the the barrel is big and relatively a lot of oak flavored molecules (when in comparison with miniature oak barrels) from the surface of the barrel diffuse into the wine, they do not make the wine taste terrible like an oak tree. Simply put, surface area of the oak exposed to unit volume of the wine is less in this case.

This is not the case with the miniature oak barrels. They expose relatively greater surface area of the barrel to a unit volume of the wine. This implies, there are greater number of diffused molecules of oak flavor per unit volume of the wine, making it taste more like the oak tree.

Note: Surface area/Volume ratio decreases with increasing volume.

Hope that helps!

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