Here are wonderful Modern things set in a vast, barrel-vaulted cavern designed by Edwin Lutyens.
Like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia, visitors head to the back of a tumbledown pub and walk through a small passage into a vast, barrel-vaulted music hall.
At the Agroturismo Vinya d'en Palerm in Sant Miquel, the Palerm family - farmers of this land since 1898 - make their own wine in a vast plastic barrel just behind the main house.
Humberto Canale Winery, established in 1909, has retained its Wild West aura with vintage trucks carting wood barrels, horse-hitched wagons (sans horse) and gorgeous, regal handmade wood wine barrels peppering the vast barrel room.
Ceresa took me through a vast frescoed, barrel-vaulted Renaissance-style hall in which giant and now obsolete wooden card-catalogue banks seemed to be sleeping; from there we went downstairs to the ultra-modern periodicals room, which has the hushed stainless-steel gleam of a Swiss bank.
It's a tranquil whitewashed place where you can wander past vast barrels containing wines from little-known grapes like aragones, castelao and trincadeira.
On the way back up we spot vast barrels of the home brew "grogue" - sugar-cane sap left to ferment and then sent for sale in Assomada.
The Monterey shale beneath California is estimated to contain a vast 15 billion barrels of oil - potentially worth $500bn £330bnn) - though there are uncertainties about whether the complex geology will allow easy extraction.
PAGE A13 In Bordeaux, Barrels, No Laughs A vast majority of Bordeaux winegrowers, beyond the great estates, which account for barely 5percentt of production, are in their deepest crisis in more than 100 years.
When Kakuei Tanaka, the boss of their faction, was weakened after being accused, among other misdeeds, of taking bribes, the two men set about taking over.Kakuei Tanaka has become a sort of legend, practising on a vast scale what Americans call pork-barrel politics: keeping constituencies sweet with public works projects, which in turn kept his business backers happy.
