Winemaking dates back thousands of years to what is known today as the Middle East. From those beginnings, vines and winemaking techniques were gradually propagated throughout parts of Asia, Europe, and most recently, to almost every region of the world.
      It is widely recognized that good wines begin in the vineyard. The French have a saying that vines need to suffer to produce good wines. This saying holds truth in the sense that the best wines are produced from low-vigor soils.

      Thanks to the winemakers' friends, the yeasts, what begins as grape juice can be transformed into the nectar of the gods: wine.

      This natural transformation has been perfected by generations of winemakers in all regions of the wine world. However, it is only in the past fifty years that scientists really began to understand what occurs chemichally and biologically during the winemaking process

The oak barrel is basically synonimous with wine making. All higher end wineries use oak barrels as part of the winemaking process. In the cooperage world, French oak barrels are definitevely the stars among barrels. This is due to the quality of the French oak forests, as well as the long-standing cooperage traditions present in French wine regions.

      When a winemaker decides to age a wine in oak, and particularly in new oak, he/she adds different flavors to the finished wines. In fact, oak aging changes the wine in numerous ways.

      The final stage of winemaking is bottling. Once in the bottle, wine undergoes various chemical and biological changes that are generally grouped under the term bottle aging.

      Bottle aging is essential for quality wines to develop and to refine their inherent varietal based characteristics. An aging wine is a living thing: its evolution continues in the bottle and usually follows a bell curve shape, beginning from its youth and then reaching its peak, folllowed by a decline in its quality.