Küferei Kardos & Kertész, Pöcking / Starnberg

About oak

Oaks are evergreen or indeciduous trees respectively - less often – bushes.  The leaves are lobed or non-lobed. The leaf margin is denticulated or plane. The stipules fall down early. Oaks can be identified and distinguished by its fruit, the acorn. The acorn is a nut, which is embedded in a kind of fruit cup, which is called cupule.

The heartwood of the oak logs is grey-brown. The heartwood stores tannic acid which causes the typical oak flavour and an enormous rotting-resistance. Towards the bark and strictly separated there are 2 to 5 cm young and light wood, the sapwood, which rots in only a few years.

This wood is valuable hardwood and is used for tabletops, timber flooring and veneers. Oak wood as well as robinia have an enormous rotting-resistance, worm damage is very rarely. Oak wood is an excellent material for components which are stressed with humidity. It is used for staircases, parquet flooring, external doors, thresholds, timber framework as well as for hydraulic engineering.

The bark of the cork oak is used for the production of corks, cork flooring etc.
From all oak species only about 180 are suitable for the production of wine barrels. Oak wood is an excellent firewood, due to the fact that it has an high heating value and it burns for a long time. Furthermore it can easily be chopped manually and it can be stored for a long time. Seven m3 of beech wood have the same heating value than eight m3 of oak wood.

In spite of this low heating value and although oaks grow a lot more slowly than beeches, the oak has always been cultivated as forest tree in Central Europe because it has been used as construction timber and because it delivered fattening feed for the cattle.