I experienced the decrease in wood quality firsthand when I worked for my dad's business building custom wine cellars. I worked in the factory building wine rac

I experienced the decrease in wood quality firsthand when I worked for my dad's business building custom wine cellars. I worked in the factory building wine racks for a couple of years after graduating high school in the 1980's, and then infrequently helped install cellars until he retired in the 2010. (It was a great opportunity to travel the world and install cellars in exotic places like Japan, Singapore, & etc.) The early cellars were all constructed using redwood, which was at that time plentiful and inexpensive ($0.20/lineal foot for 1x2). Redwood is easy to work with because it's harder than pine but softer than walnut and oak, so easy to saw and pin. "Clear heart" wood from the center of the tree doesn't warp much if stored well. It's also absorbent and so takes glue well. We particularly liked using redwood for wine cellars because it's resistive to mold due to the high tannin content. Wine cellars are susceptible to mold because the cellar's refrigeration is designed to keep a high humidity level (70-80%) so as to prevent "ullage" (loss of liquid due to evaporation). Corks are semi-permeable, and so wine evaporates through the corks due to osmotic pressure. Because I visited my dad's factory infrequently, I found the changes in wood noticeable -- the same way it's surprising how much my friend's kids have grown since I last saw them, unlike my kids who I see daily! Over time redwood became increasingly expensive, and the quality lower, with more "A grade" wood containing sapwood instead of the clear heart wood we preferred, and fewer tree rings. Wine racks use quite a large number of small pieces -- lengths of 1x1, about 0.75" x 0.75" -- and at that small size the lower quality of the wood meant more pieces were unusable due to issues with the grain. It's important to select for good wood grain so that folks don't stick their hands in a wine rack and pull back a bleeding stump filled with redwood splinters, which are nasty because the tannin in the wood also prevents the body from disolving them easily. Over time we switched to other sustainably-farmed wood like jarrah and mahogany, though those woods were super hard to work with -- they chewed up saw blades and were hard to get pins through.