"barrel" news and stories

Forget tramping to wine country to taste wine and pose for pictures sitting on a wine barrel--how about sleeping in one instead? Up in northern Holland, a hotel has made sleeping rooms out of old Beaujolais barrels. Each barrel held 15,000 liters of wine (almost 4,000 gallons). The rooms look quite, erm, cozy inside, with claustrophobically narrow single beds lining the sides, but it would be quite an experience nonetheless.

Read the full story and see interior photos at treehugger.com.

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In the past week, several news sources have run stories about a group of Hungarian builders that drank dry a barrel of rum, only to find a human body in it. Yesterday, MSNBC ran this correction, stating that the story they originally ran, based on a Reuters story, was untrue. Apparently, once the story began to circulate, people recognized it for the urban legend it was. Snopes has several variations on the theme of people (and animals) being pickled in barrels of booze. The current story claimed that the man's body had been stashed in the Jamaican barrel by his wife in an attempt to avoid the cost and paperwork of actually shipping her husband's body home properly.