Wood, Whiskey & Wine
A History of Barrels
For over 2,000 years barrels have been used to store and transport a diverse array of commodities around the earth. The story of the barrel - from its earliest form, crafted by the Celtic tribes of northern Europe in the first millennium BC, to its contemporary uses - sheds light on the history of human development and technology. Still essential in maturing the world's finest wines, brandies and whiskies, this ancient container survives today despite being under threat from the prevalence of plastics, cardboards and metals. Wood, Whisky and Wine is a unique and enlightening account of the significant, but rarely acknowledged, function of wooden barrels over the past two millennia. Always adapting to the requirements of the day, barrels have changed the face of the global economy and ensured the safe passage of provisions in times of peace and war. Intrinsically linked to the use of wood and ships, the barrel evolved to become a flexible and vital component of the world's shipping industry, transporting not only wine and beer but also everything from crude oil and explosives to nails and Tabasco sauce.This comprehensive and wide-ranging history explores the many uses of the barrel and its relations such as the keg in splendid detail, offering a new way of thinking about one of the most enduring and successful objects of our age, as well as a sobering assessment of its future. The book will appeal to anyone interested in history, technology and shipping, as well as wine, whisky and beer aficionados.
Wood Whiskey & Wine : A History of Barrels
ISBN: 9781780233567
Available to order in hardback version from all good book shops and available to purchase on-line at the bookshops listed on this page
Kindle version available to download
from Amazon
Reviews
Some one was kind enough to give me a terrific book at Christmas called Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels . . . Now it might not look like, yes, a barrel of laughs, but the story of the barrel is a truly fascinating one.’
Henry H. Work’s Wood, Whiskey and Wine is an enlightening study of this humble wooden receptacle. In simple, non-academic prose, Work traces the wooden barrel from its Celtic roots, through its heyday as a necessity for seafaring industries, to its current utility in aging alcohol. The opening chapters go into archeological detail, showing why the barrel first supplanted other ancient containers—which were mostly ceramic—and how it evolved into a form that has changed little over the centuries and remains to this day. Despite friction with competing vessels and materials, the wooden barrel has endured, although its uses, as Work laments, have become increasingly limited. What I found most interesting about the book are the sections dealing with the role of oak barrels in winemaking and distillation. Of course we all know the basics of what oak lends to wine and whiskey, but Work highlights other, less well-known aspects of this marriage. For example, something I never considered, but that winemakers are keenly aware of, is the fact that the terroir of the oak tree itself matters, as does the tightness of the wood’s grain. I was also interested to learn about the manner in which the trees are planted: in rows, close together so as to inhibit lower branch growth, which limits knots in the finished wood. Such considerations escape even avid wine drinkers. Work’s book enlightens, and leaves the reader with a greater appreciation for the cooper’s craft. For Work, a cooper himself, the oak barrel is a friend, and his appreciativeness glows on the pages. But despite this inherent bias, he has no agenda, no hostility toward progression away from wood and into plastics and other, more economical materials. Work is certainly no Luddite. Rather, he is a craftsman quietly petitioning for the respect and attention that his ancient-yet-still-important product deserves. Scenario in which I would purchase this book: Casual and concise, this is a book for every wine drinker who enjoys a bit of history. If, like me, you find yourself growing increasingly interested in the finer details of how cooperage comes to bear on winemaking, pick up a copy of Wood, Whiskey and Wine. http://www.terroirist.com/2015/01/book-review-wood-whiskey-and-wine-by-henry-h-work/
‘a thorough and entertaining journey from amphorae, barrels’ predecessors, through their period of domination to their relative demise due to replacement with such as plastic and metal containers . . . there is much to interest both the general reader and the beer enthusiast in this well written history of a container that has been with humanity for so long.’
Few people, perhaps, will immediately seize on this title as just the thing for a relative’s Christmas, even if their surname is Cooper. If it doesn’t have the wide appeal of the latest Lee Child or Jamie Oliver, though, there is plenty in it of interest, and not just for the many fans of wine and whiskey. Since the unexpected commercial success of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, there have been a number of attempts to dare to be dull, approaching apparently unpromising subjects with the attitude that anything becomes interesting if you look at it closely enough. It can be surprisingly successful; though I probably didn’t need to read the second of the two histories of dust I’ve tackled, I loved Marc Levinson’s 2006The Box, which showed just how many walks of life were transformed by one apparently unremarkable bit of kit., the shipping container. The barrel, of course, was in many respects the precursor of this development, and Henry Work sets out to demonstrate the technological, cultural and economic importance of barrels from their development, probably before 500 BC, to their ubiquity for storage and transport from the Middle Ages until the early 20th century. Wood, whiskey and wine provide a snappy alliterative title and happen also to be Work’s own direct experience; he is a cooper who has worked in the vineyards of Napa Valley, Kentucky whiskey distilleries (he knows to spell it without the ‘e’ when talking about the drinkable stuff) and in New Zealand. Almost every conceivable commodity has been transported and stored in barrels, though: beer, of course, but also cereal crops, grains, tobacco, molasses, cement, fish — New England cod was shipped to Europe and Chesapeake oysters to the Pacific coast — even linen and crockery. The development of petroleum products led to a huge expansion in barrel production, while the phrase ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’, rather unexpectedly, comes from the days when they were used to transport coins. The barrel, Work points out, is a far from simple idea. Many civilisations came up with buckets, probably first by hollowing out logs and then by binding slats of wood together, but barrels tapered at both ends seem only to have been devised by Northern European Celts. Much of this history is speculative, since the Celts didn’t write, and based on archaeological evidence, necessarily limited by the physical composition of barrels. The two chief references by Roman authors both describe unorthodox uses: one, an attack with rolling barrels of pitch which had been set alight; and the other, the construction of a pontoon bridge. But Work’s theory that their initial development was the happy coincidence of the emergence of iron tools in Northern Europe, a plentiful supply of forest and the enthusiasm of Celts for beer and wine is quite convincing. Despite the recent growth in the subject, not enough history is about the importance of food and drink as a motivating force — for most of history, and for much of humanity still, the overwhelming motive — for innovation in trade and technology. Work also points out that the techniques of boat-building and cooperage are similar; though that raises questions about why the Greeks, Romans and Chinese were so slow to come up with barrels themselves. He points out several obvious improvements which the barrel offers on amphorae and other ceramic vessels. They are more robust and can be hermetically sealed at each end. They can be reused. Standardised sizes, and a bewildering number of names (hogsheads, kegs, butts, casks, tuns, puncheons) could be adopted to suit the product. The improvement which I felt densest for not having appreciated, given the number of times I have watched the competing contrade of Montepulciano in their festival on the last Sunday of August, is the fact that they roll. The Montepulciano race is uphill, so it never occurred to me that rolling out the barrel was a barrel of fun (the barrel in those lyrics is a beer barrel, by the way). It looked much more like hard work. I can’t claim Henry Work’s book is a barrel of of laughs, but is consistently interesting.
In October 1901, a 63-year-old woman named Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to survive a plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Her vessel was 4 1/2 feet tall, 3 feet in diameter and fitted out with leather harnesses and cushions. Barrel and Box, a trade publication, took note of the stunt, suggesting that Taylor be “spanked and put to bed for taking such a foolish trip.” But the journal couldn’t disguise a bit of professional pride: “We are pleased with the ability of our coopers to make a barrel that will stand the racket.” As well they should have been. At the beginning of the last century, the barrel was king, found everywhere and used to ship nails, biscuits, beer, petroleum, whiskey, pickles, coins and pretty much anything else that would fit from here to there. In 1910, some 91 million barrels were made in the United States. Barrels filled boxcars and boats and horse-drawn wagons and the flatbeds of rudimentary trucks. The barrel is a small miracle: something made of wood without nails or glue, which can hold liquids almost indefinitely, save for a small amount of evaporation (wood being not absolutely airtight). Barrels were ubiquitous because they were both sensible and indestructible. They are essentially a pair of intersecting arches. They’re easily handled by a trained stevedore when full: Barrels roll along an edge when upright, and when on their side only a small bit touches the ground, so friction is minimal. “The barrel is really a container on wheels,” noted Fred Hankerson in the “Cooperage Handbook” (1947). While utilitarian, they were also a remarkable example of craft, with talented, well-trained coopers hand making these with simple tools well into the Industrial Age. Sadly, since about 1910, barrels have been rolling only downhill, toward oblivion. Around that time, flour millers stopped using them in favour of sacks; manufacturers soon embraced cardboard and other lighter, less expensive containers. And then along came 55-gallon steel drums, pallets and forklifts. As Henry H. Work writes in “Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels,” the final blow was struck in 1956, when a trucking business owner named Malcom P. McLean became determined to come up with a way to reduce delays in loading and unloading at cargo ports. He conceived the 20- and 40-foot containers that could go directly from ship to truck. Mr. Work, an American cooper who now lives in New Zealand, tells the surprisingly complicated story of barrels in 14 somewhat erratic chapters. He begins at the beginning, making a case that wooden barrels of the sort we see today arose in the first century B.C. in the forests of Western and Central Europe. The Celts had a “craving for the elixir of the grape,” he notes, and engaged in widespread trade of the same, which involved clay amphoras. But such vessels were heavy, cumbersome and fragile. Mr. Work argues that advanced Celtic tools, aided by ample hardwood forests, would have allowed the Celts to “make the long jump from tapered, multi-piece pails and buckets to enclosed barrels.” Wooden artefacts from antiquity were nearly always destroyed by rot and insects, but a few early barrels preserved in bogs and tombs bolster this argument. AdvertisementConstructed of wooden staves and held together with either wooden or metal hoops, barrels quickly became an essential part of trade. Romans used them in their commercial dalliances around the Mediterranean, and they were a lifeline between the thirsty English and the Bordeaux region of France from the Middle Ages on. Barrels leapt the Atlantic to become the common coin of American commerce; Ports along rivers and harbors were invariably lined with great stacks of barrels awaiting shipment or delivery, like some great glacial moraine of trade. Barrels would have been wholly displaced today save for one lucky quirk, discovered by happenstance during centuries of transport: Spirits and wine stored in oak barrels tended to show marked improvement over time. (Where oak was not easy available, other wood proved equally useful: “Greek and Cypriot retsina wine is made in pine barrels, but these are coated on the inside to prevent leakage, which tends to give the wine its resin-like taste and thus its name,” Mr. Work writes.) White oak contains elements like lactones and tannins and a phenolic aldehyde called vanillin, which gives the better bourbons those pleasingly elusive notes of vanilla. What’s more, barrels are semipermeable, allowing oxygen in, and water and alcohol vapour out, and thus create controlled chemical reactions that influence flavor. “Wood, Whiskey and Wine” is a book that needed to be written, but at times I questioned whether it’s a book that needed to be read. It can be dry and plodding—have I mentioned that this is a book about barrels? The chapters on coopers and cooperages are somewhat choppy and disjointed. I would have liked more reporting on current trends, including experiments like the “honeycomb” barrels being used by some spirits makers to amplify wood flavor, or the use of smaller barrels to alter the ratio of wood to liquor. And I came across occasional departures from fact, such as the claim that bourbon has a higher sugar content than wine, and its leaky barrels are thus more prone to self-sealing. But overall Mr. Work has done a fine job directing the spotlight toward an object that seems to beg for inattention. Although much diminished from their peak a century ago, coopers are today thriving again with American bourbon makers clamouring for new casks. (Federal regulations require that anything labeled “bourbon” be aged in new oak casks.) The number of craft spirits producers has also surged in the past decade, and barrels are suddenly in short supply. Among vintners, high-quality barrels also remain in high demand, although makers of cheaper wines have embraced workarounds, including the use of oak chips and short planks placed in stainless steel tanks. Mr. Work offers a breezy tour through all this and more. When you reach the end of this book, I can pretty much guarantee you won’t think of barrels the same way again. Next time you pass a geranium planter made from an old whiskey barrel cleaved in two at Home Depot, take a moment to pause and pay your respects. This was the container that built America. By WAYNE CURTIS Feb. 13, 2015 7:08 p.m. ET
