Word of the Week: Cooperage

All great wine starts with great grapes. However, stellar fruit alone is not the only essential factor at work in producing an exceptional wine. Seeing as most great wines are finished in a barrel, the quality of a barrel plays a significant role in a wine’s final outcome. That’s where a cooperage comes in. A cooperage is the worksite where barrels are assembled and repaired. Here, artisan barrel-makers, or “coopers,” will undergo such tasks as sawing the wood into staves (the curved wooden planks that make up a barrel), seasoning the oak, securing the staves in place with metal hoops, and toasting the barrel’s interior. Historically, all wine producers would operate their own cooperages. Such circumstances are rare in present times, but a quorum of historic producers in Spain’s Rioja and Ribera del Duero regions maintain cooperages on site. Today, most wineries work with an assortment of outside cooperages instead. While cooperages exist in every important wine-producing country, the two most important barrel industries exist in the United States and France. By volume, the United States, particularly the Midwest, assembles more barrels each year than any other nation, clocking in at an estimated two million in 2013. Nonetheless, roughly a mere five percent are sold to wineries, while the majority of production is used for the ageing of bourbon. French cooperages (or “tonnelleries” as they’re called there) only produce one-fourth the number of barrels as American cooperages, but are more closely tied to wine industry. French oak barrels are costlier than their American counterparts, and most high-end producers will purchase vessels from a variety of different cooperages to further add complexity to their wines. The same wine in the same vintage can develop remarkably different characters depending on what barrel it’s aged in and the cooper who made it.