Barrel Making, Day 2

Day 2
Today I worked inside the toasting room, which has the capacity for 5 barrels at a time. However since I have been here there have been only 4 going at a time. I am working with a man named Big Fred. To say the least he is big and he has been cooping since he was 14 — he is now 44. He is a big man. If he were alive in medieval times he would have easily been called Little John. He has red hair, spent a few years in America cooping in St. Helena, so he knows about 30 words in English, and loves to work really hard and listen to soft rock really loud. The first step in the toasting process is to take the skeleton looking barrel (it only has one side of the rungs and the other side looks like rib bones, so it creates a cone shape) and put it over the fire station. The next station is where you apply the other side of the rungs on the barrel. You do this by using a cable and a winch to pull it tight. The skeleton barrel is then sprayed with water and is pulled tighter to have a normal appearance. You let all the water evaporate off the sides of the barrel where it was sprayed and then you pull it a bit tighter and pull it off the fire and set it on its side. You put a rung on the very end of the barrel to hold the “normal” shape of a barrel and release the tension of the cable. You flip the barrel around and continue to heat while hammering down the rungs. The next station is just for heating, unless you have a 400 Lt barrel. In-between stages 2-3 you hammer the rungs of the barrel and also the inside to make sure all the pieces of wood are placed perfectly. THEN THE TOASTING: The toasting is where you put smaller pieces of oak in the fire and build up a medium sized flame and then put a metal lid on the top of the barrel to put out the fire little by little. The smoke is what gives the barrel its flavor.

The toasting is hard to explain, but the imagery is beautiful. It is a small, darker room that is all made of concrete. It is in the heart of the cooperage so you can see people walking, drilling, yelling, laughing, and pushing all around you. The smell of the freshly toasted barrels is one of the best on earth: it is like waking up to homemade bread, sweet and comforting, but even better. The room is warm and smoky with a brilliant glow about the side of the barrels and the walls. It is very refreshing.

After toasting was done (it goes till 3pm) I was scraping the tops of wine barrels, which really hurts the hands and is very dull. I was relieved when some coopers thought it would be fun - and funny for them - for me to shape the barrels. They don’t speak English, but they communicated well enough with eyes and gestures. They showed me how to do it and I was not even close to good. First you lay out all the rough wood that goes into a barrel. Then is really gets too hard to explain, but take my word for it, it is hard and I am nowhere near even mediocre.

The coopers seem to think that I am the crazy American and that I love the hard work that they endure every day, so we have a mutual respect for each other. We struggle to understand one another, but find is easy to share the joy of laughter.
--Drew