IV. Establishing the Facts: Do Sherry Casks Contain the Ratio Necessary for Nullification?
Now that we have determined that according to many poskim, in order to nullify the wine blios in Sherry casks, the volume of Scotch must be at least six times greater than the amount of wine absorbed in the casks, it is crucial to determine if that volume is generally present. This requires an evaluation of the volume of the contents of the barrel vs. the volume of liquid absorbed in the walls of a Scotch barrel.
The wine barrels commonly used nowadays to mature Scotch are Sherry casks, or “butts,” which generally contain 500 liters. In order to conclude that the wine blios are batul b’sheish one must ascertain that the liquid-to-wood ratio is more than 6:1. Studying the dimensions of a standard 500 liter Sherry butt, one discovers that the liquid-to-wood ratio is substantially less than 6:1, which means that there would not be enough Scotch to nullify the blios of the entire thickness of the walls b’sheish. (Although one would intuitively take the wood mass into consideration when calculating how much wine is absorbed, for purposes of halachah we measure the blios contained in the walls as if the walls were hollow and full of blios. The Shulchan Aruch 98:4 explains that since it is impossible to ascertain the precise volume of non-kosher taste absorbed in the walls, we must consider the walls to be completely imbued with non-kosher taste.)
How does one calculate the volume of absorbed wine in a Sherry cask? The Beis Yosef (98:4) cites the Mordechai that the simplest method to calculate the volume of the walls of a vessel is to use the displacement method: One fills a large vessel with water, dunks the vessel in question inside, and measures the displaced water. However, this is quite difficult to do with a large 500L barrel. Accordingly, we must use a different method.
The calculation of the volume of the walls of a standard barrel was made using a barrel calculator to figure the volume of a barrel using dimensions of a 500L Sherry butt offered by Antex Rioja, a used-barrel supplier in Spain. The internal and external dimensions are presented in the accompanying chart (see right).
The barrel calculator indicates that the internal volume of liquid contained inside this barrel is 511.5L (fairly close to the stated volume), while the external volume of the barrel is 647.4L. Accordingly, it appears that the walls have
The calculator uses the dimensions of a barrel and considers the stave thickness to be paper-thin. By subtracting the volume of a slightly smaller barrel (using the internal dimensions) from the volume of the larger barrel (using the external dimensions), one can ascertain the volume of the walls.
It should be noted that the standard formula to calculate the volume of a cylinder (V = πr2 h) cannot be used to calculate the volume of a barrel due to the fact that the side walls bulge outward. The barrel calculator takes this into consideration by using the standard shape of barrels.
