Congrats on embarking on the ever-fascinating and (just as often) maddening adventure of using oak in home winemaking! You’ve discovered what many of your predecessors already have — that it is sometimes difficult to locate appropriate equipment, additives and supplies, especially in the smaller quantities and sizes that so many of us home winemakers require.
Rather than waste any more time on the Internet (which we all need like another hole in the hogshead) looking for blueprints for barrel racks, I would just make like a Burgundian and get yourself some little triangular pieces of wood about 5”x3”x5”, and about 2 inches thick. I call these little isosceles wedges of scrap wood “chocks” (as I’m sure others out there do) and I use them all the time to keep barrels from rolling around in my cellar. You need four per barrel and all you do is position your barrel (bung hole up of course) on the floor where you want it in the cellar (or garage, or back porch, etc.) and then shove your handy wooden triangles under the barrel between the floor and the bilge, two at either end, and hopefully, with a little prodding and nudging, your barrel will lay contentedly on its side, completely stable and ready for filling.
If you want to keep your barrel off the floor and get even more fancy, get a pair of 2”x4”s about, say, 2–3 feet long, put them down first, one on either end of the barrel (perpendicular to the staves) so that the barrel is balancing on them and not on the floor. Then stick your chocks under the barrel where it meets the 2”x4” and you’ve got an even better, cheap off-the-floor stand! If this sounds a little hokey and homespun, take heart in the fact that many wineries the world over rely on this system and stack hundreds of barrels, pyramid style, using 2×4’s and chocks. They are quite stable, especially when the barrel is filled with wine, and make a neat, aesthetically pleasing display of barrels in a cellar, rather than those fussy metal racks that invariably lose their metal coating after five years. To raise the barrel to a height convenient for racking as you’ve mentioned, you could take it a step further and build a sturdy platform about a foot high that has a flat surface and use your 2”x4”s and chocks in the way we’ve discussed.
For more of the Wine Wizard’s wisdom, pick up the latest copy of WineMaker, available at better homebrew shops and bookstore locations.
