barrel storage, has both aesthetic and practical ramifications. In most wineries there are visitors to impress, although they tend to find efficient modern reality less impressive than cobwebbed tradition. Some much-visited wineries fill their barrels in full view of the tourists before trucking the wine down the road to a clinical modern barrel warehouse, carefully regulated for both temperature and humidity. In Bordeaux particularly, it is traditional to anoint the band around the middle of the barrel with wine, giving it a neat pink stripe—indeed in some of today’s most immaculate barrel cellars this is the only visible sign that a liquid called wine is involved at all.
