Hardwood, from the Campus Terra grounds to the home of wine

A madeira, do chan do Campus Terra ao fogar do viño

The doctoral dissertation written by Adriana Conde, from the School of Engineering of the USC, contributes to the optimisation of the design of barrels used in distilleries

Lugo

Friday, January 14, 2022

In the same way that water is vital to plants, wood plays a very important role in the grape juice fermentation process. The light that allows to obtain a quality product is shed from the Campus Terra, where new research projects come to life.

This is the case of the doctoral thesis of Adriana Conde Fernández, a Forestry engineer and researcher at the School of Engineering of the Lugo Campus of the USC. Her thesis, supervised by the professor of the Department of Agroforestry Engineering Pablo Vila Lameiro, is called “The optimisation of barrels as key elements in the ageing of wine, and the suitability of Galician hardwoods for their production”.

Over the last few months, she has conducted a thorough study of the geometric structure of barrels in order to identify some errors in traditional empirical formulas. This data collected allowed this engineer from Lugo to measure, model and standardise staves — that is, the different planks that barrels are made of, which are key to the production process.

One of the key steps of the fermentation of Conde’s research was the analysis of the physical-mechanical properties of Galician of Castanea sativa Mill. and Acacia melanoxylon R. Br. wood. One of its main conclusions is that both forest species present the most appropriate qualities for their use in distilleries, as the characteristics of chestnut trees are similar to those of oaks, the hardwood par excellence in the cooper industry.

In this sense, the findings explained in Adriana Conde’s thesis —who has been working for almost a decade in the USC BioMoDem group on projects funded by Irish Distillers and Pernod Ricard, as well as by BioReDes of Campus Terra— bring to light the existence of an important niche market for Galician hardwood.

Thanks to the healthy innovation of this doctoral thesis and the energy of Campus Terra, this study is a first step in improving the production process of wine through the optimisation and improvement of the efficiency of barrel designs.