I am looking at doing something similar to sofie paradisi soon and am wanting to do it right. I looked into wine soaked oak cubes, chips, spirals, shavings, particle board and all the other shenanigans and am leaning toward picking up a 5-10 gallon used white wine barrel to age a saison in. My question is, have any of you procured a small wine barrel through a barrel broker, and what kind of experience did you have? Ideally this barrel would hang out in my "cellar" and continously have sommething aging in it, probably some version of this saison I'm dreaming up.
I don't think brokers usually deal with barrels that small (wine barrels especially). It'll vary place-to-place and their stock probably turns over quickly. Call around, see what you can find. We got some of our barrels for Modern Times through a broker, enough to cut the 20 big powerful red-barrels we got directly from a local winery.
How big were those barrels? I think I could do up to a half barrel in my basement. EDIT: maybe even a full barrel...
I found this is my work emails spam folder a few days ago. Prices seem pretty reasonable and you can get a Sauternes barrel which is pretty awesome. http://www.premierwinecask.com/index.html Edit: Maybe email them because on the site I don't see prices or specifics, but the email they sent me had more info.
