A good article on wine barrels from eric asimov of the NYT.
Could the Recession Change the Taste of California Wine? - The Pour Blog - NYTimes.com
"For example, new barrels made of French oak, which have been running over $1,000 apiece. Many of those new barrels were not used because good wine requires them, but because winemakers were trying to impart the vanilla, chocolate, mocha and spice flavor that comes from new oak. Few wines benefit from this treatment, in my opinion. Too many simply are overbearingly oaky.
But barrel-aging has many benefits that go beyond layering on flavor. It can contribute greatly to the texture and body of a wine. It would not surprise me to see producers of expensive wines below the tippy-top level reducing the number of new oak barrels that they use. Perhaps they will save money by reusing older barrels, which will offer many of the benefits of barrel-aging without the burden of new oakiness.
Chardonnay producers have already been moving away from overt oakiness for several years. I expect to see even more chardonnays using no-oak marketing terms like naked, virgin, inox, metallico and the more plain-spoken unoaked. The question is will red wine follow suit. I think it will, as I think that many winemakers had already made the aesthetic decision to back away from the heavy use of oak. Now they have the economic incentive as well.
The only downside will be if wine producers instead opt for cheaper oak alternatives for the sole purpose of imparting flavor, like infusing wine with teabags of oak chips. This would have a true cheapening effect, and not in the economic sense."