Wood Chips in Your Wine?

Reading my usual wine blogs and websites this morning, I came across an unusual (at least it's new to me) process in winemaking. Apparently the new oak barrels that a lot of wine is aged in are really, really expensive. As a way to get around spending the money to buy new ones every year or on the labor to clean them out, there are are variety of ways to sort-of simulate the oak-aging process. One of these methods involves literally tossing wood chips into the wine, letting them soak, then straining them out later. I don't know why this weirds me out so much, but I'm a little appalled. Granted, most of the wineries guilty of these techniques are large companies producing massive vintages every year. If you're shooting for a common taste for every single bottle, this is an easy-out solution to reaching those ends. Nevertheless, given the choice between a wine made by a smaller vineyard and actually aged in a barrel, and one of these wood chip varieties, I'll take the former every time. Funny postscript to this idea, apparently Budweiser may use a similar method when they say every bottle is "beachwood aged." Hilarious.