Ever wonder what happens to wine barrels when a vintage is ready to be bottled? As it turns out, recycling them for the next round of wine is not a preferred practice by serious wine-makers as the old flavors might taint the new grapes.

While the industry works on ways to better reuse barrels in the same way (by fulling purging remnant wine, for example) the door is open to folks who would like to buy used barrels on the cheap, strip them down, flatten them out and use them to build some age and personality into home hardwood floors that can be hard to do using typical (most costly) architectural salvage.