Coopers Vincent Bouchard of Bouchard Cooperages (from left), Phil Burton of Barrel Builders and Guillaume Maugeais of Tonnellerie Radoux USA field questions from the moderator, winemaker Jeff Cohn of Jeff Cohn Cellars.

Speaking to an audience of fellow winemakers at the second annual Wines & Vines Oak Conference, Celia Welch said it’s time for them to embrace oak barrel alternatives.

Welch, who has been a winemaker for more than 30 years and currently produces premium Cabernet Sauvignon from single-vineyard estates in Napa Valley and her own brand Corra Wines, said the environmental and cost benefits of alternative products should be enough for winemakers to take them seriously. Chips, staves and other alternatives use parts of harvested oak trees that barrels do not and also cost far less than new barrels.

The quality of such products has also improved dramatically in recent years, Welch said, explaining that they now truly provide an alternative to barrels. “In my own trials they prove to be as good as—or better than—traditional barrels,” she said.

Welch delivered the keynote address at the conference, which took place at the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone campus in St. Helena, Calif., on April 27. The event drew a crowd of more than 250 people who attended seminars held in the barrel room of the historic building and technical tastings in an adjacent theater.

Welch, who began working in winemaking in 1982, recounted that back then a typical barrel-cleaning regimen included adding 2 pounds of soda ash per barrel. The caustic chemical did an OK job of reducing volatile acidity and Brett, but it also removed “everything else that was charming or delicious about that barrel.”

She also recalled how barrel cellars used to be much quieter before they housed the noisy climate-control machinery or other equipment that is often accompanied by the blare of music from cellar workers’ radios. Barrel topping often was only marked by the quiet tapping of hammers on wooden bungs to gently loosen them from bungholes. “I just remember the sound.…There was a romantic quietude to a day of topping in a quiet cellar,” she said.

Welch recounted reaching into the darkness of barrel racks trying to find those wooden bungs and sometimes grabbing a rotted one that had become saturated with wine. “I don’t remember sterilizing those bungs or anyone saying we needed to soak those bungs in really hot water to get them clean,” she said.

She also remembers several wineries with Brett problems and said there more than likely was a connection. Those traditional redwood bungs were replaced by silicone bungs—an innovation that has proved to be a major improvement in maintaining wine quality.

And in addition to better bungs, winemakers today have more options to use oak in a variety of ways rather than just traditional barrels. “We’re missing an opportunity. These alternative products we’re hearing about are really, really good,” she said.

Welch’s remarks are notable in that most winemakers for wineries producing high-priced, premium wines rarely talk about their use of alternatives publicly and will typically only say they use them sparingly. It’s common for those in the trade and consumer wine press to describe the use of oak alternatives in a disparaging way—as either a mark of poor winemaking or a way to cover up the flaws of wine made with low-quality fruit.

Welch also asked the audience not to forget the lessons of the 2014 Napa earthquake that toppled barrel stacks at many wineries in the southern half of Napa County. One of those hardest hit was Laird Family Estate, where Welch stores many of her barrels. The earthquake struck at 3:20 a.m., and Welch said that had it come at a different hour, it would have been a much more terrible scene than just toppled barrels. “No one would have made it out of that chai alive,” she said.

Keeping barrels and people safe during earthquakes
Welch said winemakers can stack barrels lower, use the latest seismically secure racks or strap the top barrels to their racks so they don’t bounce off and cause other racks to topple. “I don’t want any of us to lose sight of the earthquake we had two years ago,” she said. “Hopefully the point has been hit home well, but we owe it to our colleagues to do everything we can do to keep ourselves, our product and coworkers safe.”

Another facility that suffered from the earthquake was Napa Barrel Care, which is owned by Mike Blom, who spoke during a session about how winemakers can best protect their investment in new oak barrels. Dozens of barrel stacks at the warehouse located in south Napa toppled resulting in a huge mess that took months to clean up. Images of the heaps of barrels and racks from Blom’s facility spread though social media, and his efforts to get everything back in order was featured in Wines & Vines and national media outlets.

Since then, Blom has made several changes to how he stacks barrels. Instead of using the common configuration with barrel heads facing the row ends where forklifts operate, the bilges of the barrels now face the row ends and the heads face the narrow walking aisle between rows. Blom also now secures the top three stacks of barrels to each other with heavy-duty straps around the barrel bilges. The straps should help restrain the barrels on the uppermost racks from jumping clear of their racks and causing other racks to topple.

The barrels are also stacked lower, at only six high, to help them withstand some shaking during an earthquake. Blom said the goal wasn’t to make the barrels impregnable to an earthquake but to keep them standing as long as possible. “The No. 1 issue and the No. 1 goal is to give my staff, any vendors and any customers the time to get out of the building,” he said.

Configuring his warehouse to best achieve that goal also proved slightly more efficient. With 11 rows of seven barrel stacks at six barrels high, Blom said his room can fit 1,848 barrels, which is 10% more than what he could fit with 14 rows of 10 stacks at six high.

He said such a stacking arrangement is well suited to four-barrel racks, which are seismically more stable. If a winery is considering changing to four-barrel racks, Blom noted they may also need a bigger forklift to handle the extra weight.

Most of the barrels at Blom’s warehouse are still on two-barrel racks because those are what his clients use. In the aftermath of the earthquake, however, only about 10% of the toppled barrels were a loss, while there was a 20% loss of racks. “As strong as the racks are, they’re going to be a casualty as well,” he said.

He said one of his clients has a winery in the Mt. Veeder AVA of Napa Valley and decided to use new, “seismic-safe” racks after the earthquake wrecked his barrel room. The racks are produced by Barrel Safe, and the four corners of each rack rest on the posts of the rack below it rather than on the barrels.

Such racks provide far more stability, but a winemaker needs to make sure they will work with how the winery is set up for barrel washing, topping and other jobs. Blom said they do reduce some available space for barrel storage. “However you’re gaining more stability with your racks and insuring your investment in a better way,” he said.

Discussing what he expects to see in the barrel room of the future, Blom said “smart bungs” will be more prevalent. These are bungs equipped with sensors that monitor and wirelessly transmit wine chemistry data, fill level, wine temperature and other information. He also expects sensors to be located throughout warehouses and on barrels to provide constant, real-time tracking of barrels.

Water recycling will also become more widespread because of the rising cost of fresh water or treating wastewater. Blom made note of the Napa wine kegging company Free Flow Wines that installed an elaborate water recycling program that reuses rinse water for the company’s thousands of kegs. A large winery with an extensive barrel program could find large savings by just reusing the last rinse water from barrel washing as the first rinse for the next barrel.

And, he added, one can “always count on more regulations,” and winemakers should expect more inspections, monitoring and paperwork from state and federal agencies.

Questioning the coopers
Winemaker Jeff Cohn, who founded Jeff Cohn Cellars in 1997 while he was working at Rosenblum Cellars, is known for having conducted extensive barrel trials during his career. He has written about those trials and his experiences with oak for Wines & Vines and Wine Business Monthly. Cohn moderated a panel discussion of coopers to provide attendees with a better sense of the factors that influence the price of barrels and advancements in the cooperage trade.

Joining Cohn on the stage were Phil Burton, owner of Barrel Builders and importer of Tonnellerie Marchive; Vincent Bouchard, owner of barrel importer Bouchard Cooperages, and Guillaume Maugeais, production manager at Tonnellerie Radoux USA.

Cohn’s first question touched on what he described as the enemy of every winemaker: the prices of new oak barrels.

Burton said winemakers should just expect prices to continue increasing, especially with French oak, but he reminded the audience that they can pick when they get invoiced for their barrel order. Depending on where the dollar is in relation to the euro, a winery could save some money if it invoices at delivery rather than at ordering and vice versa. “If Britain opts out of the EU, the euro could drop considerably,” he added.

Bouchard noted that American oak is also getting more expensive, and he explained that because the supply of French oak is regulated by the government, it invariably will increase year to year. “The winner is the government. It’s why the price of oak is going up, it’s the reason why the price of barrels is going up,” he said.

When Cohn brought up the growing number of specialty barrels that are released by cooperages every year, it launched a discussion about the use of technology in the cooperage versus sticking with the traditional approach of manual craftsmanship.

Bouchard said it’s been very interesting to him to see the amount of marketing by other companies touting their high-tech production methods and introduce new brands and barrels. Yet he still believes the best way to produce barrels is with the hands of an experienced cooper.

Maugeais countered that what winemakers want most of all is consistency, and Radoux’s oak tannin-scanning system and other innovations help ensure the company produces the same barrels each vintage. Yet, he said, such technology is not so effective unless the staves are assembled by a skilled cooper.

He added that cooperages are offering a greater variety of barrels in response to demands from winemakers. All of the panelists said they are seeing more interest from winemakers in barrels that bring a more restrained oak touch to their wines and for larger vessels like puncheons.

Burton said when he started in the barrel business, it was common to receive shipping containers from Europe filled with unwrapped barrels with a couple of inches of standing seawater that had leaked in during shipment. Now barrels are shrink-wrapped and carefully packaged, and most coopers sell a consistent, well-made product.

“The bar is high. You can not mess up anymore,” he said.