So you are saying we buy French oak for making wine here but they buy American oak for making whiskey/whisky over there?
Actually, we use your
rejects.
Scotch is always matured in oak casks, nowadays nearly always American oak because it's easy to come by.
However, although Scotch whisky is matured in oak casks, the oak
mustn't be new wood. If it was, it'd result in far too raw a taste of whisky. Instead, Scotch whisky is matured in, usually, spent American bourbon casks.
This works out just fine because, as I understand matters, by law American distillers are not permitted to use a cask more than once for bourbon, and Scotch distillers require used casks...
For this reason, after a first-fill of bourbon, the casks are dismantled, exported and reassembled in the U.K., ready to be filled with whisky. Where do you think whisky gets
some of its colour from?
Of course cherry casks are also used in so called double-matured whiskies. Here, the greater part of maturation takes place in American oak casks before being tranferred to cherry casks for a short period prior to bottling. Again, the cherry wood will have an effect on the final colour of the whisky and, of course, its taste.
