Maturation, wooden containers

Some Aspects of the Wooden Container as a Factor in Wine Maturation... 

Singleton, V. L. (1974). Some aspects of wooden container as a factor in wine maturation. In "Chemistry of Winemaking", A. D. Webb (Ed.), pp. 254-277. American Chemical society, Washington, DC. 

Traditionally, maturation of red wines generally occurs in barrels or other wooden containers of various volumes. The wood provides special conditions for maturation that are favorable to the development of the wines character (Del Alamo Sanza et al., 2004 Perez-Coello and Diaz-Maroto, 2009). These usually include limited oxidation. Wood porosity together with filling and refilling operations ensure both a slow continuous and periodic incorporation of oxygen into the wine. The oxygen favors... 

The flavour of newly-distilled whiskey is crude and unpleasant, particularly in the case of pot still whiskey, which contains more secondary products than the patent still. By storage in wooden casks changes are bro light about iu the character of the secondary constituents, with the result that the flavour is improved this process is maturing. Patent still spirit costs less to manufacture than pot still, and if the two are mixed, a milder, more uniform, and cheaper product is obtained by mixing immature pot stfll spirit—which is naturally cheaper than the fully matured article—with patent still whiskey, the unpleasant taste of the former is toned down so that the mixtiue becomes more palatable. The proportion of pot still whiskey in cheap blends depends on the price the cheapest may contain as little as 10 per cent. 

Scotch malt whiskies contain complex mixtures of phenolic compounds which are extracted from the wooden casks in which the maturation process takes place. The phenolic profile is influenced by several factors including the length of maturation, the species of oak from which the casks are made, the pre-treatment of the cask by charring of the wood, prior... 

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