Every home winemaker starts with the dream of aging their wine in new French Oak Barrels, just like they do in the caves of Burgundy. Likewise, each time an acquaintance learns of my hobby for the first time, one of the first questions they ask is whether I use oak barrels for my aging. When I start to explain to them the reasons why using oak barrels is impractical for the home winemaker, I can see in their faces that without knowing anything about winemaking, they’ve already concluded that I’m a piker.
Nonetheless, oak barrels are ridiculously expensive, leak, are difficult to maintain and require a volume of production that make them unrealistic resources for those of us who make wine in our garage/basement. But that doesn’t mean we have to give up on imparting that delicious oaky flavor to the wines we produce. On the contrary, oak chips will do the job just fine – or so the books say. 
This weekend I added 2 ¼ cups of oak chips to my 2010 Pinot Noir, or ¼ cup per gallon. For the first couple days, the chips float near the surface, but once they get thoroughly soaked with the wine, they will drift down to the bottom along with the other sediment. After 3 or 4 weeks, I’ll rack the wine into fresh carboys, and just like that, I’ll have a perfectly balanced Pinot with just the right hint of oak, for 1/100 of the cost of a barrel. Genius.
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