Better Wine
Winemakers know the superior quality of wine made in concrete.
Shown above, at the first annual Innovation + Quality event in Napa, 400 winemakers tasted wine fermented in concrete, oak, and steel. Concrete was the clear winner. Concrete breathes like oak, giving the wine delicious complexity and enhanced mouthfeel with a hint of crisp minerality and no added flavors to mask the fruit. This brings the pure fruit flavor forward, allowing the wine to showcase its true terroir and taste more like where it is from. The quality of oak degrades as you use it. Concrete always gives peak flavor and will produce ten times as much wine as oak.
Huge Savings Over Oak
The arithmetic is compelling.
One concrete NuBarrel® holds as much wine as four oak barrels. It will cost a little more initially,
but it will still be producing superior wine long after those oak barrels are pushing up daisies.
Concrete NuBarrels® also require less labor to manage and clean, they take less space, and
they make fabulous wine. How much did your winery spend on oak last year? To make great wine for less, use concrete NuBarrels® for aging, blending and small-batch fermentation.
Oak Dominates Your Budget
It’s the elephant in the room.
"We shoot our capital budget every year on barrels. That’s the elephant. Then the little bit of money we have left over we can spend on other things to make our wine better, but barrels eat-up all of our capital, and then they depreciate so quickly. Five or six years later they’re going out of here, and it’s a disposal problem almost, so these (NuBarrels®) just give us a lot more options."
John Williams, Owner of Frog's Leap Winery
...and 71 concrete NuBarrels®
Fully Customizable
Can your oak barrel do this?
Sonoma Cast Stone concrete tanks are highly-engineered and feature-rich designs made to your spec, not to ours. In addition to choice of color and logo placement, other options include: four lid styles, racking valve, pomace door, flavor/sensor port, oxygen emitter, heating coils, oak stave holder, additive oak sleeve, oak anchor, stacking hardware and concrete floor bolts.
Less Space Per Gallon Than Oak
Concrete NuBarrels Require A Third Less Space
NuBarrels® stack and bolt together in pairs, resulting in increased efficiency which can give you a third more yield per square-foot of warehouse space. This configuration has passed rigorous shake testing at the UC Berkeley Seismological Testing Center. An engineered framework can result in even greater efficiency and higher yield per sq-ft of warehouse space.
Easier To Use Than Oak
Less hassle, less labor, even less water.
How is your labor cost in managing all those oak barrels? Labor is an area of savings that you will notice right away. Concrete NuBarrels® usually only have to be topped once, and that can be done without moving the tank. The same is true for cleaning, filling and draining: all can be done in place. One NuBarrel® = four oak barrels, but cleaning one concrete NuBarrel® is much easier than cleaning a single barrel. The process also requires less water.
