Episode 218: The Barrel Management Episode

Recorded: July 2026

Jim Duane: Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode is just going to be me. I'm going to talk about something I get a lot of questions about, which is barrel management — specifically empty barrel management. So I'm going to talk about that, and it's going to be a bit rambly.

But before we get into it, here's a message from this episode's sponsor, which is Innovint. Even as a small producer, tracking all of your winemaking matters. It matters so much that 11 or 12 years ago now, a winemaker, my friend Ashley Dubois Leonard, decided to create better software for our industry — software that I use at Seavey and recommend often to my peers.

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It works great and saves me a lot of time. Innovint automates my compliance reporting too, which is a huge bonus, and they even do case goods inventory management now. You can learn more by going to Innovint, I-N-N-O-V-I-N-T, or straight to the website at innovint.us.

Okay, let's talk business. What do I have going on? I still have availability — one or two spots — for the trip to Mexico in February 2027. This is Valle de Guadalupe, February 22nd to the 28th. More information on the website, insidewinemaking.com. This is going to be super fun and super culinary-focused too. There are a lot of awesome restaurants I'm very excited about, either associated with wineries or just in the Valle de Guadalupe, which is two hours south of San Diego.

That's the February 2027 trip. Then I'm going to build a trip for June 2027 — I have yet to do so — down to the south of France, Provence, and then up into the Rhône. I haven't figured out if it's going to be the southern Rhône or just Gigondas, that kind of southern France area, which is going to be beautiful. Great food, awesome wines, and I love the mountains of Gigondas. That's really why I want to go there.

Then February 2028, I think it's going to be South Africa. And the next summer I'm definitely coming back to Italy — after just taking the group to Tuscany, I'm itching to get back. So Piemonte in the summer, June 2028. A lot of people told me that if I thought Tuscany was beautiful, Piemonte was going to be the next level, and I was like, holy shit, Tuscany's pretty awesome. So okay, let's do it.

Jim Duane: I haven't released an episode for a while because I've been traveling with the group in Tuscany, which was awesome. We had literally the best time. Let me just talk about each day. We'd get up — we had big nights, so sometimes it was rough to get up in the morning — and we'd get in our van with our driver Carlotta each day, starting in Florence, then Siena, and then ending for three days in Montalcino.

We'd usually visit two different small wineries. We were in Chianti Classico and Montalcino, and obviously three days in Montalcino because I love Brunellos. In Italy it's a lot of small producers, so you're with the owners, the family, the winemakers. The number of times I heard about someone honoring what their grandfather or grandmother did — that was the story of Tuscany. And the Sangiovese was awesome.

So, two winery visits, then a lunch around one or two, a little later, this huge giant Tuscan lunch with way too much olive oil, always ending with tiramisu. I don't schedule dinners on these trips because we tend to eat big late lunches, so no one needs to eat. We'd go back to our hotel rooms in Siena or Montalcino, take a little nap. It was hot — it felt like 147 degrees in Italy in June — and everyone's like, "Oh my God, I can't eat dinner, I'm so full, what should we do?" And we'd just find a bar walking through town, and the bar would turn into everyone meeting up, and then we'd go do dinner starting at 10 p.m.

We closed down a lot of restaurants. It's fun to eat until midnight and then get up the next day to do it again. You wouldn't do this normally in life, but for seven days in Tuscany, it was pretty awesome.

Sign-up is still available for Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico, and the summer 2027 trip is yet to come — I've got to organize that a little.

The last thing to promote is the winemaking class. Clark Smith, who created the Fundamentals of Winemaking Made Easy video course, which is awesome, had to change platforms — the old one shit the bed. He migrated to a new one, it's done, it's taken care of. That's a tab on my website, and it's a great way to prepare for harvest. The video course is about 450 bucks, and with the discount code INSIDEWINEMAKING, all caps, you get $25 off and you support the show. So thank you.

Jim Duane: Okay, let's talk about this already-rambling episode. Let me pull up my notes. We're going to talk about empty barrels. This started as a conversation I had with Kelly and some other people on the Tuscany trip who wanted to know the best way to manage their empty barrels, but I get this question a lot, so I wanted to address it. I'm not interviewing anyone in this podcast — it's all me. That's why it's going to be rambling.

My friend Brian Barmore — Barmore, maybe it's Barnmore — makes wine at 21 Brix in Portland, New York. He asked me: for a new barrel, do you go straight into them or swell them? And if you're storing empty barrels, is dry or wet preferred?

That's a good starting point. I had AI give me an organization so I can talk about all these things, so I'm going to go through how Claude organized this for me. I read through it and I don't agree with a lot of it, so it'll be a good way to organize my arguments on how to think about managing empty barrels.

Okay, intro — why barrel management matters. Oak is one of the biggest investments in the cellar, blah blah blah. That's boring.

Segment one is receiving barrels at the winery. You get your new barrel, you paid a lot of money for it, you don't want to mess it up. You want to make sure it's good and ready. Inspecting barrels on arrival — good idea, but there's not a whole lot you can see here. If the hoops are loose and the wood has gone dry and it's not wrapped in plastic shrink wrap, that's a problem. But I don't tend to see that. Most coopers are really good now — they know how to ship barrels all across the world and keep them decently hydrated.

You can look inside a barrel. I've had bosses in the past who were very interested in any blemish you could find, but I don't think that matters. It's wood. It's a natural product. They toast it over live fire. Is that little knot on the inside of your barrel a problem? Is it going to harbor bad bacteria and yeast? Only if you have bad bacteria and yeast in your cellar. If not, calm down.

Jim Duane: Segment two: managing empty barrels before use. This is a big one. Coopers want to move barrels physically to you as soon as possible, which means you have to store them before harvest. A lot of cooperages offer early-order or early-delivery discounts so they can move their inventory, and this is a pain because all wineries are short on space, and empty barrels just take up space. When you get them, they're generally going to come humidified and shrink-wrapped, in good condition, so it's your job to keep them that way from delivery until you fill them at harvest.

The simple advice is: just put them in a cellar that's 55 degrees and 85% relative humidity, and they'll be fine. But most of us don't have a humidified cellar or great air conditioning. I get it. So here's what to think about: that barrel ships to you, hopefully in good condition with good hydration, and you just want to keep that hydration.

The best thing to do, more important than anything else, is keep the shrink wrap on. A lot of barrels come with cardboard head pads on both heads — I'd recommend taking that off, getting rid of the cardboard, and wrapping it in more shrink wrap. Make a sealed container so moisture can't leave, and just mummify those fuckers. Keep them so the humidity stays in the barrel. It won't cause mold if there's no other water or substrate introduced. If it's just oak, wrap it up and keep that moisture in, because even in a warm or not-so-humid cellar you can manage it that way. That's the best and easiest way. I hear people doing all sorts of weird shit, and that's the one thing you can do.

If that's not an option, you've got to hydrate your barrels — rinse them, drain them. If you haven't used them yet, maybe you burn sulfur, maybe you don't. I'm kind of 50-50 on that one, probably not. But if you've ever had wine in a barrel, then you do have to burn sulfur in it, or you're going to have issues.

What happens if a new barrel dries out, and how do you recover it? If a barrel's too dry, you rinse it. No secret to it. Hot water helps a little, but it doesn't matter as much as just getting it wet — put it on one head for an hour, tip it over. Depends how dry it is, but I've recovered some very dry barrels. It just takes persistent wetting of the staves. You can pound down the hoops a little, but you're really getting into trouble at that point.

Jim Duane: Segment three: hydrating barrels and leak testing before filling. Why does hydration matter, even on brand-new barrels? Because if it's not hydrated, the staves shrink and you leak between them. We've all dealt with that. It's a pain.

The cold-water swelling method: 24 hours before you want to fill a barrel, you pull it out, rinse it, and put some cold water in it. Put it on its head for an hour or a couple hours, doesn't matter, then roll it to the other head for a couple hours. Should be good. The key is to do this the day before — you want about 24 hours of hydration. That'll swell most barrels that have been kept in decent condition back to being sealed.

Claude wants me to talk about the hot-water method. Hot water maybe swells your wood a little faster, but whatever, it's not going to help much. I do steam my barrels before I use them — that's a great way to hydrate quickly, but not everyone has a steamer. A quick steam, a minute or less, and rinse before the steam to get all the sulfur out.

How long should you swell? It says 24 to 72 hours depending on barrel condition. Obviously, if your barrel's still leaking, keep swelling — you can't fill it with wine yet. But planning 72 hours in advance during harvest is a lot of forethought. Maybe not an issue for a small winery.

This is my favorite bullet point: identifying leaks. Turns out they identify themselves. That's the easiest part of winemaking. Then it asks, what's a seep versus a real problem? Pretty self-explanatory. If it's squirting out — which happens when a borer bug leaves a good hole with a serious bore to it — that's a real problem. If your wine is squirting out of your barrel, do something about it.

Everyone with a cellar and a few barrels should have a barrel repair kit, and that should include spiles, which coopers will give or sell to you. A spile is like the tip of a pencil — a piece of oak in that sharp cone shape. You use a hammer to pound it into a hole, and it helps to use an awl first to open up the seepage hole a bit. That's most of my leak repair — like 90% of what I can do is just those spiles.

Sometimes it's on the bilge, but 95% of the time it's on the head, where the head staves meet the bilge staves in that whole croze-and-chime area. That's where you get most of your leaks, and it's also where bugs like to hide and create their nasty little holes. The nice thing is they're an easy fix — hammer in a spile, compress the oak on all sides, and it clogs the leak. Beyond that, you've got to get someone professional, and I feel for people who aren't close to a cooperage.

Jim Duane: You've got to get good at fixing your own barrels, but it's hard. A lot of times bugs crawl under the metal hoops to do their nasty oak-boring business, so if there's seepage under your hoops, just pull the little nails from the sides of the hoops, use a hammer to move the hoops, and see if there's an obvious fix. The coopers have told me bugs go there to hide because it's dark.

When to call the cooperage versus handle it yourself? Call the cooperage if you live where you can. If not, handle it yourself. It's good to have a relationship with your coopers — call them up if you've got a leak, do a FaceTime video. All the coopers I know will totally help you fix a leak, and they'll bring in the real, serious guys.

Then it says draining and timing the fill after rehydration. The number-one dumb piece of advice I could give any winemaker on barrel management is: don't have empty barrels. Empty your barrel and bottle your wine right before you fill it again with your next wine. To the degree you can do that, great — less time with an empty barrel is just less management. But your life and the life cycle of your wine are dictated by other things, so you're going to have empty barrels. Still, if you ever have a chance to keep a barrel full, that's ideal, because empty-barrel management is work — you're working against time and entropy and dehydration.

Segment four: stacking and filling. Stacking considerations, meaning before you fill. If you're on barrel racks, put them on the racks. I spend a lot of time with my staff each year, new people at harvest, explaining that it's important to center the barrel on the rack, especially when you're stacking racks. At Seavey we do most of our barrels on pyramids, so that's a whole different thing.

Weight load capacity, floor capacity — we're not talking about that. Access for sampling and topping: don't stack yourself into a corner. Genius advice. Bung position when barrels are racked — 12 o'clock for filled barrels. This helps people read their cellar: filled barrels have the bung up at 12 o'clock, and empty barrels get rolled to 9 or 3 o'clock. Good way to tell empty from full at a distance. I'm not even going to get into the tight-bunging thing we all obsessed about 15 years ago — filling barrels and rolling them to get a super-tight bung. I never saw the advantage, so hopefully no one does that anymore.

Jim Duane: Let's talk about filling — end of harvest here. Claude says you should purge with CO2 or argon to prevent oxidation. That's fine in certain situations — a very oxidative grape like Pinot Noir, Grenache, Sangiovese, take more care. But with a Bordelais variety, or any red wine filled and saturated with CO2, I don't see the point in purging the air out before you fill. You're filling within a couple minutes — it's not a lot of contact time. And if your wine is supersaturated with CO2 at the end of harvest, you're just wasting gas. Argon's expensive; CO2 would be the better choice.

But we all know that if you drop a little turd of dry ice in your barrel and then fill it, you get a cloud you can't see through, so you can't see the wine level as you're filling. That's a problem too.

Now, if you're making a Chardonnay or a white you're going to ferment in barrel, you'd be filling with juice, and then it's a great idea to purge the air. CO2 is the cheapest gas at harvest. Argon seems extra; nitrogen, whatever — not a huge deal.

Remember, I had John Skupny on the podcast from Lang & Reed, and he talked about making their Chenin Blanc with native ferments. He'd fill the barrel with the full 60 gallons of juice, and then a couple days later, as the ferment started slow, they'd drop it from 60 gallons down to 52 so there was headspace for fermentation. I thought that was cool, because when you put 52 gallons in and have eight gallons of headspace, even if you purged, there's still some oxygen pickup — you can shine a flashlight in and see the top centimeter is a little oxidized. Going native, you might have eight days sitting there oxidizing, and that's a bit much for me. You can lose freshness. Less of an issue if you're inoculating and can start fermentation quicker. So I like John's idea of filling full, then bringing the level back down once fermentation starts. It's an extra step, but there it is.

Leaving proper ullage — that's the headspace between the bung and the top of the barrel. Why does it matter? If you're filling wine that's supersaturated with CO2 straight out of fermentation, it's bubbly, and as soon as you get near the bottom of the bung it's going to volcano out of your barrel. So leave a little ullage of a couple inches if it's a young wine with a lot of CO2. Young wines get foamy as you fill, so it's a mess. Just fill close to the top — that's what I tell the interns — because in a couple days we'll come back and top it up. Take it near the bung, maybe not tippy-top. If it's a 57-gallon fill and you have three gallons of headspace for a couple days while it off-gasses, that's fine. Chill out, come back, and top it.

Jim Duane: Bunging — silicone versus wood bungs. I don't know anyone who still uses wood bungs, so probably silicone. There are numerous fermentation bung options. The old bubblers I hate with a passion — the most god-awful fruit fly collectors ever, so please don't use those. There are so many good options.

My favorites are Fermrite bungs — I have no affiliation with them, but they may make the best sanitary, hygienic bung. It's a two-piece bung that lets CO2 escape under a silicone flap easily but otherwise seals, and they stay in the barrel. Some other bungs pop out all the time. Just, for the love of God, don't use bubblers.

You need a fermentation bung if you're fermenting in barrel, or if you have a young wine that's gone to barrel with a lot of CO2 still off-gassing. Put in your hard bung when there's not enough gas to give you back pressure. If you bung on a Wednesday and come back Friday and there's a little vacuum, you're ready for a hard bung. If there's no vacuum, no reason to go to a hard bung yet. That's the quick and easy rule I just made up.

Segment five: washing and sanitizing barrels. You should do this after emptying a barrel. Immediate rinse — that's a rule I live by. I rinse my barrels as soon as I can. Why does timing matter? Don't let wine residue dry and set. Think about what's at the bottom of your barrel — depends how much lees you have, but lees are just nutrients: yeast and bacteria sitting on a pile of nutrients. Imagine your kid sitting on a mound of donuts. That's what I picture inside my barrel when the wine's gone and the lees are just sitting there. Then you introduce oxygen because the wine's gone, and your bacteria go crazy.

So please rinse your barrels as soon as possible after you rack the wine out — for the sake of my anxiety, do it the same day. A few hours later is fine. The next day, I'm getting upset. Over the weekend, we've got problems. Do not let your lees sit that long.

Hot-water rinse protocol: do it if you have hot water or a high-pressure setup. You want the barrel upside down on some device rinsing with as much pressure as you can muster. But I think people go overboard — some of this equipment gets crazy expensive, thousands of dollars for these sexy little barrel washers. It's a bit much. I honestly just use wall water pressure for my barrels at Seavey, and it does a good job. I have a steamer, so I can get through tartrates and other things, and I have very clean, sanitary barrels. I don't think a pressure washer is necessary.

I'm also pretty cavalier about having some tartrates in the barrel — I don't think it's a problem at all. I have a Chardonnay barrel from 2012, a puncheon, my one and only puncheon. I've kept it 14 years, going on 15, and it's got a lot of tartrates in there. I'm not sure you can see any wood anymore, but it makes great wine, so I'm happy with it. What's the downside of tartrates? I get a lot of arguments about this because I'm so cavalier. Some people say yeast and bacteria can live behind the tartrates in the wood — that's true, that's an issue.

Jim Duane: But if you don't have bad yeast and bad bacteria, and you have a good rinser and can burn some SO2 or get some SO2 into your barrels, you're going to be okay. And if you have a high-pressure washer, some awesome Tom Beard washer, great — use it.

Next, sanitizing options: sulfur dioxide. So you've rinsed your barrel. I want to be very clear: do not burn sulfur or add sulfur gas to a barrel that has any puddling water in it. That's a real problem — you run through the sulfur and can get weird flavors in the next wine. So get that barrel fully emptied. If you're on a metal rack, leave it bung-down overnight; a couple days is fine, more than that I get cranky. Let it fully drip dry. We won't call the barrel dry, because it's moist inside — that's the nature of the barrel — but no standing water when you go to add sulfur. I'm big on that.

Say you rack out on a Wednesday, rinse right after because you're a good winemaker, and let them drip dry overnight. Come back and gas your barrels the next day. If you're not back for a couple days, that's okay. If you're not back until after the weekend, now I'm nervous — I think you should rinse again and get a little more serious about sanitation. Even after drip-drying, there's moisture in that barrel, filled with bacteria that now have all the oxygen they want, so you have to keep the microbes at bay or you'll get a sour barrel and ruin it. Two days without any sanitizing agent is my rule.

You can burn sulfur — that's my favorite, old school for sure. The other option is SO2 gas, and I have strong opinions. I apologize if I piss off anyone who uses sulfur gas, but I think SO2 gas is too toxic to have in a winery — unless you and everyone who works there can honestly state you have a very robust safety and illness-and-injury-prevention plan in place. That stuff's poison, it leaks out of cylinders, and it's awful, especially indoors in a cave or building. Not because it doesn't work, but because it's dangerous, and a lot of people don't have robust enough procedures and PPE to keep workers safe.

If you've ever smelled SO2 gas — and I'm guessing everyone who's worked around it has — then you know it's not fully contained, and it's toxic. Also, if you're going to use sulfur gas in California, you have to do a pesticide test in Sacramento. It's that serious — a real serious pesticide. Here's why people use it: it's efficient. Burning sulfur in a barrel takes time — you light it, come back, pick up the burnt ash, it's slow and tedious. With SO2 gas you put the hose in a barrel, shoot it for two seconds, and go to the next. But think about that: you're shooting it into a barrel, which isn't a sealed vessel, so you're pushing air — and some SO2 gas — out into the room. You're going to smell it. It gives people headaches. It's awful.

Jim Duane: So I really want the industry to get off SO2 gas, but I understand its utility.

Now it says citric and SO2 as a sanitizer. Molecular SO2 is a good sanitizer, but it needs to be in a solution with a low pH, like 3.2 or lower, so you'd add citric or tartaric acid to the SO2 solution to get a lot of molecular SO2 with sanitizing properties. I'd do that, maybe soak the barrel overnight, then empty it.

Ozone treatment — here goes my next soapbox. I don't like ozone. I think it's a joke. I don't think it sanitizes barrels. I've seen barrels with Brettanomyces get "sanitized" with ozone and then continue to infect other wines with that Brett. Ozone is a physical contact agent — you need a little generator that makes five or six ppm of ozone dissolved in water. This is not gaseous ozone; it's ozone dissolved in water. It does sanitize yeast and bacteria on contact, but that's the issue: contact. The only thing ozone sanitizes is what it physically touches. If your Brett cell or a biofilm is three millimeters deep in the wood — and wood has crevices and nooks, barrels are just staves compressed together — the ozone isn't going to kill anything it doesn't touch. I just think ozone's a joke. It also makes people sick.

Steam — I really like steam for sanitizing barrels. It's great: no chemicals, very low water use. But it's expensive, high electrical usage — we had to put in a special outlet at the winery to run our steamer. And it's dangerous. It's steam, so you need serious working protocols so people don't melt their eyeballs off. The burns are real. But a couple minutes of steaming does a great job of cleaning — physical removal of debris, melting tartrates off barrels and tanks. I'm a big fan of steam. I realize it's not an option for everyone.

How else could you sanitize a barrel? In the old-school days you'd put Proxyclean or some other awful oxidizing agent in your barrel, and it would turn your staves black. If whatever chemical you're using turns your staves black, don't put that shit in your barrel — you don't want it in contact with your wine, ever. I know some of these OxiClean-type products supposedly end up as oxygen and water with no residue. Here's my thing: give it the lick test. Anytime a sanitizing agent claims to evaporate into CO2, oxygen, and water with no residue — clean it, let it dry, and lick it. Do you taste something? If you taste something, there's residue. And there's a lot of residue on this stuff. Don't clean your barrels with these alkaline agents. Yes, you can kill some bacterial issues, but then you ruin your barrels. Not worth it. Just pressure-wash your barrel as much as you can, let it dry, and have good empty-barrel management by burning your SO2.

Checking cleanliness: put your flashlight in the barrel and look for issues. Sometimes when you burn sulfur, a pellet or the film drops and burns on the barrel, and it makes a mess in there, so wash it extra if that happens. Sometimes you have to work until you get that unburnt sulfur pellet out. Definitely do not want a sulfur pellet in your barrel when you fill it with new wine.

Jim Duane: And smell — smell your barrels. You should always smell them before you fill or use them, and smell them often. But be careful: if you've burned sulfur, or especially if you put SO2 gas in there, don't pop a bung and stick your nose in and get a huge breath of SO2. It's awful. Put your hand in front of the bung and wave the aromas toward your nose. If you smell sulfur or it's neutral, that's usually a good thing. If it smells sweet, like candy or sherry, you've got a bacterial issue and you need to rinse — not a terrible issue, but re-rinse, dry, and sulfur them again. It happens. Then, depending on your cellar conditions, you burn more sulfur or add more gas periodically. I don't have a prescriptive time because it depends on your cellar, but in my good conditions of 55 degrees and 85% relative humidity, I burn sulfur about once every four months.

Keeping empty barrels healthy: the two enemies are drying out and microbial contamination. Very good, Claude.

Short-term storage — days to a few weeks. It says sulfur-stick burning or an SO2 solution. Here's my next soapbox. If you've used your barrel and burned your sulfur, great, or used SO2 gas, fine — and you want to use it within days to weeks, just pop the bung, rinse it, smell it, make sure it's good, and use it.

Then there's the SO2-solution maintenance fill. I don't like this, but a lot of people do it. You put water in the barrel — fill it, or just a few gallons — add some SO2 because it's antimicrobial, and hopefully add acid (citric, tartaric, whatever) to shift the pH down so the SO2 is in molecular form. You don't need much acid because there's no buffer capacity in plain water like there is in wine. So people have this acidified solution with a lot of molecular SO2 that's supposed to keep the barrel healthy. I've heard that for years.

But I went to a conference last year where a cooper got up and explained that it's great for 24 to 48 hours, and then all the available sulfur is gone — no antimicrobial power left after that — and people leave their barrels like that for months. He said if you were really on top of it, you'd need to add more sulfur every single day. That sounded a little excessive, but I hear his point: nobody checks the free SO2 of their solution after they do it. So he was recommending against the sulfur solution. The advantage of filling the barrel with that acidified sulfur solution is you keep the staves hydrated and, in theory, microbiologically sound — you hit both goals. But it just sounds like that sulfur-citric solution doesn't hold long enough.

Jim Duane: So he recommended — I'm not going to name his cooperage without his permission, but it's a real cooperage and he's a real professional — the best thing you can do is rinse your barrel, burn your sulfur gas, and wrap it in plastic. Full mummy, wrap it in shrink wrap, keep that moisture in. That's the key: manage contamination by burning your sulfur, manage hydration by wrapping it up, and stop messing around with a couple gallons of water in the bottom. That's my recommendation, and it comes from people much more professional than I am.

Medium-term storage: if you're storing barrels for months, you just have to recharge the SO2 — "recharge" is Claude's word, not mine — meaning burn more sulfur or add more gas. Some people use ozone now. Again, I don't like ozone inside because it gives people stomachaches. The gas does do a good job of sanitizing, and being a gas it would permeate better than ozonated water, in theory. But ozone's kind of dangerous. I don't think as many people are ozone-gassing barrels, but you could. I'd be interested to hear from people with more experience there.

So there's just a frequency with which you rehydrate and/or recharge the sulfur, and it depends on your storage conditions. If it's dry, you'll do it more often. You don't want the staves getting loose when you move the barrel, making a ton of noise as you roll it because all the staves are hitting independently instead of working as one — that barrel's too dry, and you've got to rinse it and stay on top of hydration. I smell my barrels, and if they're getting a little sweetness, a little sherry, I burn more sulfur. If it's a very strong smell, I rinse, dry, then sulfur. But generally they're pretty neutral when stored for a couple months.

Monitor for Brett — well, you don't monitor your empty barrels for Brett, you monitor your wine for Brett. Keeping cellar humidity up — cool, do it when you can. Sometimes just wetting the cellar down really gets the humidity up. A lot of places have a policy of wetting down the cellar before they go home at night.

Long-term storage — I think I covered that in my earlier going-ons. Knowing when a barrel is done: a barrel can be done because it's 100% neutral and you don't want a neutral barrel; or when chasing and fixing all the leaks becomes too much of a pain, or it's a leak you can't fix. I have a couple of older barrels where the bung just doesn't seal well anymore — I think from using the barrel-stirring insert for so many years, it warped the staves at the bung, so I can't make a good seal. If your barrel's not sealed, that's a problem. But otherwise, as a physical vessel, barrels can be good indefinitely.

Outro wants me to recap the key principles. I do not want to repeat myself. Listener Q&A teaser or call for questions — yeah, hit me up if you have questions. My voicemail didn't really work, so email jim@insidewinemaking if you have any questions.

Jim Duane: I also get a lot of questions through Instagram, like I did with Brian, who kicked off this podcast. Let's go back and answer his questions. Brian Barmore from 21 Brix Winery in New York. Find me at Inside Winemaking on Instagram — if you DM me, I get some questions there. I can't answer everything, but okay.

Brian asked: for a new barrel, do you go straight in or swell them? I give them a little pre-rinse just to make sure they're not going to leak. I'd rather see the leak with water than with wine. And if you're storing empty barrels, wet or dry? Dry, definitely dry. Dry and shrink-wrapped. Thanks, Brian. Thanks for listening.

I've rambled through way more than I wanted to. Sorry if I missed any key points — I'm going to blame that on the AI, but it's a lot.

Valle de Guadalupe, February 22nd to 28th, 2027 — a couple spots available. I don't have any other winemaking classes currently available. I'm running Deep Winemaking in a couple weeks, my three-day class you can read about at insidewinemaking.com. I have another class on August 15th, but that's sold out. So the next class after that is going to be in February 2027 — a one-day class. I usually use the winter to talk about heat and cold stabilization, fining and filtration, and the finishing of wines, because that's more appropriate in that season. That's it.

Okay, I've got to read the Innovint outro. This episode has been sponsored by Innovint. If you're still using spreadsheets or notebooks to keep track of your winemaking — I've been there — there's a better way. Innovint makes it easy to stay on top of your vineyard notes, cellar work, even case goods, all in one place. And now, with intelligent winery workflows, you can take advantage of the power of AI and spend less time behind your desk and more time making wine. Go to innovint.us — that's I-N-N-O-V-I-N-T dot U-S — to learn more and see what it can do for your winery.