good4whatAlesU said:
From a botanical perspective (flavour aside) I read that they are in the same genus but different species.
America would typically use their native oak "Quercus alba" native to america.
French use Quercus robur or Quercus petraea ovbiously native to Europe.
Australia doesn't have any native oaks of the genus Quercus .. we have some things that a commonly called oak (e.g. River She Oak) which are actually Allocasuarinas. e.g. Allocasuarina cunninghamiana (river she-oak) or Allocasuarina luehmannii (Bull oak).
Actually I read that Western Australia she-oak "Alloasuarina fraseriana" was used extensively for beer barrels.
Those barrels would have been lined with pitch so the wood identity wouldn't matter so much. Until they nearly wiped it out shipping barrels were also apparently made from Australian cedar (not a cedar, actually not even a softwood, more closely related to mahogany than anything else)
BTW with French oak an important distinction is the forest in which they are grown: the forest of Troncais, for instance, is widely regarded as very fine and "tight" while Limousin is looser and "broader", the terms in quotes being descriptors of tannin structure not wood structure.
Drying is important. Three year air dried earns a premium, kiln dried is shunned. Where that air is is surprisingly important: there was once a study done on this by maturing the same oak in two different places and then sending half of each lot back to the other to be coopered, maturation site was more important than cooperage location. Demptos sell American oak barrels made in their French cooperage and made in their American cooperage, they are quite different.
That said, maker is also important: Francois Freres are usually agressively toasty, Taransaud are usually refined and subtle etc etc. Choosing barrels that suit your wine is a big part of winemaking.
BTW early settlers tended to name Australian trees after the euro wood it most resembled, so anything with prominent ray tracheids got called "oak" including several casuarinas, allocasuarinas and even a couple of eucalypts. Problem is there aren't many species of hardwood in Europe due to recent glaciation, whereas in Australia there are over 600 species of Eucalypt alone, at least as many Acacia and hundreds of species outside these two genera.