Get the undisputed quality of wine made in concrete.
Fermentation or aging of reds or whites, small batch or large production.
Lasts ten times as long as oak, requires less space and less labor.
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.
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.
"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®
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.
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.
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.
These concrete amphora containers are a vision of antiquity brought to life in your barrel room, and they are the perfect storage vessels to bring your finest wines to fruition. With all the amazing advantages of concrete, the amphora tanks are also hand-crafted to our exacting standards. They can carry your logo, the colors of your choice, including an optional, second color, and they all come with our unique, 10-year guarantee against structural cracking.
A unique style of engineering that makes our concrete tanks so durable.
Precise temperature control, hidden and kept apart from the wine.
With your choice of color and logo treatment to wow your guests.
48,000 sq-ft production facility packed with the right tools and talent.
All of our concrete wine tanks are guaranteed not to crack or leak.
