My rainwater capture tank is smaller than a butt holding wine. It's only 110 gallons, or a pair of 55 gallon drums.

Still, a container of a full butt of wine is more than 2 full industrial 55 gallon drums. It's going to weigh somewhere near a thousand pounds of liquid (110 gallons of fresh water is 880 pounds).

Just handling one would require some heavy industry type equipment, especially if the bottle were made of glass. You'd need it in a gimbal tilt mechanism, or just get it in something like an aviation type fuel tank with a collapsible bladder so the wine stays sealed between usages, and a regular valve and spigot like you'd have on an old fashioned cask of Amontillado.

Metrics are a lot easier to work with. 475 liters = 475 kilograms (1 liter = 1 kilogram) therefore it would be 1,047.196 pounds.

FWIW

Yeah. It's still a VERY heavy item.

Unless it has a steel outer protective  sheath with hard lugs that can handle being picked up with a forklift or an overhead gantry crane, good luck pouring a glass of wine from it.

$1,661.87 in cats (ROCKETMAN_S) said...

good luck pouring a glass of wine from it.

LOL...

Just turn it upright and bore a hole in it and place a spout/tap on the top, then turn it over sideways and open the spout to easily get as many glasses as you can drink! (* CHUCKLE *)

FWIW

What I picture now is more like a very large, oversized wooden barrel, like a jumbo sized version of the ones the "revenooers" were dumping into the sewers during Prohibition.

What a waste of perfectly good booze.

That was what specifically led to the rise of organized crime - Prohibition. And history is repeating itself as government forgets that trying to legislate morality is going to backfire, maybe in a very big way.

A wine barrel that big though is more than big enough for the Mafia to stuff Jimmy Hoffa into before entombing it in concrete beneath Giants Stadium, or maybe in Lake Mead. Until drought lowers the water enough that all of the crimes of the past are revealed in the light of day.

It always backfires, doesn’t it?

Yep. In a book I read way back in the late 1970s, the phrase they used was the invisible hand of unintended consequences.

And on both ends of the political spectrum these days, I have noticed they have forgotten that government which governs best is that which governs least.

More government means more dystopia.

$1,661.87 in cats (ROCKETMAN_S) said...

And on both ends of the political spectrum these days, I have noticed they have forgotten that government which governs best is that which governs least.

More government means more dystopia.

Absolutely.

The Democrats have always been for bigger government, but recently, some of the Republicans have come on board too... as you mentioned.

FWIW