cask, wooden container for wine, often used interchangeably with barrel, a cylindrical container small enough to be rolled. The term is also used less precisely, however, for any form of cooperage, i.e. wooden containers of any size, whether larger, immobile storage containers such as the oval Fuder or foudre common in Germany and Alsace, or the botte of Italy, and also including quite large, immovable containers which may or may not be open topped.
In the 1970s, the Australian wine industry neatly, if misleadingly, coined the term cask wine for wine packaged in a bag packed inside a cardboard box, a wine type highly unlikely to have been either made or aged in wood of any sort (although oak chips may well have played a part in some).
