“Not many of these blokes will be doing fingernail polish advertisements,” I thoughtfully told myself. The snappy James Lindner, of Langmeil Wines at Tanunda, was giving another of his remarkable lunches.  A notable previous one was the amazing day when the 94-year-old Dr Ray Beckwith stood up and for the first time in his life told the story of his discovery of the importance of pH in winemaking in the ’30s.  No one who attended will ever forget that.  This one was to honour the coopers of the Barossa: 24 men from seven cooperages.  We worked out that between them, this long table of blokes make about 80 per cent of the wine barrels used in Australia.

There’s been a great deal of bullshit spoken about oak.  Most wines that boast of having oak maturation have never seen a barrel.  At the extreme end, some may resort to essence of oak chips, like the shipment I innocently signed for upon its arrival at Rothbury wines 30 years ago.  While I suggested there was sufficient there to turn Sydney Harbor into Chardonnay, Len Evans’ shotgun rider insisted the turps was for laboratory use only.

Within the law, sawdust, shavings, chips, planks and innerstaves make up the most of the oak which is not your actual barrel.  In the business, we jokingly call this “small oak”.  The back labels might claim “small oak” occasionally, but these days you’re more likely to spot the word “subtle”.

“Oak alternatives, we call that,” explained Master Cooper Peter John, who runs Australia’s biggest cooperage, AP John, in Tanunda.  “That’s the stuff that goes into the wine, rather than stuff the wine goes into.  Between 15 and 20 per cent of our sales revenue comes from oak alternatives.”

But while the men around that table are very happy to make a buck selling their offcuts to winemakers who can’t afford real barrels, their pride is in their barrel craft.  Peter’s a fourth-generation cooper.  His mighty dad, Master Cooper and fellow Baron of the Barossa, Warren John, died recently, triggering the idea of this lunch; Peter’s son Alex is being groomed to take over in due course.

Coopers are deemed worthy of great respect in the Barossa.  Richard Lindner, James’s dad, said he thought he’d get along to Warren’s funeral early.  “You know, Whitey, get to the service 20 minutes before it started, find a quiet seat and remember Warren.  Not a chance.  The crowd was that big you couldn’t get near the church.”

Peter said: “When I started in 1976, we were an artisan cooperage making a hundred barrels a year for Grange. The breach Alex is preparing to step into is gonna be a helluva lot different to the one I walked into.  We make 30,000 barrels a year now.  We generally have around 30 employees.

“It’s a different world.  I was very lucky.  I learnt on the go.  Alex has been through every analytical wine course we can find.  He’s studied the science and chemistry of wood, of polyphenols, the chemistry of grain spacing, cool-climate oak versus warmer, the whole deal.  Everything we can learn from the cooperages of the USA and France.”

Apart from that book learning, coopering is tough physical work.  Barrels are heavy.  Oak has splinters.  Shaving machines and electric planers, hammers and hoop drivers are hard, violent things.  It takes years and fingers to learn to wrangle barrels quickly and efficiently.

“Say when one of these young blokes start, when they grab a barrel, they’re slow,” said Anthony Werner, of Cooperages 1912, just up the road from AP John’s.  “You gotta learn to be careful.  It’s dangerous.  Takes a long time to learn.  Lots can go wrong.  So like a young feller might take four or five hours to work through 30 barrels.  I can shave 30 barrels in about an hour 40, but I’ve been doing it for 17 years.”

He’s talking about puncheons, barriques, hogsheads and the like.  Wood you can roll and stack.  Some jobs are a lot bigger.  Out of his 50 years of coopering, Glen Shulz says the biggest, trickiest job was one he and Peter John worked on at the Riverland Fruit Cannery.  To break down citrus peel for jam manufacture, the factory used a powerful acid brine solution that would eat concrete and stainless steel.  So the lads took their timber and tools up the river and built the biggest wooden vats Australia is likely to see.

“They were 100,000 litres each,” Peter recalls, a little ruefully.  “We built nine of ’em.”

“It was bloody dangerous,” Glen said.  “We’d have half the staves in place on the base, just standing there, and if you got a gust of wind the whole lot of ’em would fall on you.  But we got it done.  It was a challenge.  But you know, we were young ’uns.  We enjoyed it.  We were proud of what we did.”

Coopering has bizarre timeframes.  It commonly takes about 120 years for a French oak to grow big enough to supply enough suitable wood to make a couple of good barrels.  People wince at the notion of beautiful trees being cut, but the consolation is the simple fact that the French are great foresters, an activity called sylviculture.  Forest land is farmed for a profit, just like any other farmland.  One quarter of France is under forest, and a third of that is oak.  The French have reforested two million hectares of land since the destruction of World War II.

The French sell trees by auction.  A tranche of forest is mapped and delineated, and the composition of its timber recorded.  Potential buyers inspect the trees, and are permitted to take cores from their trunks to check the suitability of their grain.  Only a certain percentage of the trees in any tranche are marked for removal, and these can be of various species.  The buyer is obliged to remove all the trees marked for harvest, whether he wants only the best oak or not: buyers must have contacts in many industries requiring timber in order to sell all the wood they are obliged to harvest but do not need.

The auction is Dutch: the auctioneer starts at a high price and comes down.  First buyer to break ranks and poke a finger up gets the timber.  The auctions are very tense; much Gauloise smoke fills the air. The buyer is then obliged to remove the designated trees within a certain period of time and make the forest clean for the replanters.  And so the cycle repeats.

So a cooper like Peter buys through a French agent, and the wood is shipped to the Barossa, cut, or split, and stacked for 35 months seasoning before a barrel can be made.  While AP John is now backed by a French cooper, they also sell American oak products.  Conversely, Cooperages 1912 has an American backer, but also sells French oak.

These are coopers of formidable reputation: AP John exports around 3000 barrels per annum, to the US and Europe.

So what happens, with such extreme timeframes, when the wine business takes a downturn, or the fashion for overt sappy oak wanes, as it is now mercifully doing?

“All coopers are having a tough time in terms of profitability,” Peter said.  “The sheer scale of our inventory, the exchange rate … things work against you.  This is our leanest year in 10.

“Australia has some of the most respected coopers on Earth, but we’re also the most expensive.  But, you know, we’ve had 25 exceptional years, and we can tolerate a cycle like this.  We adapt.  Like with this trend to more subtle oak in the premium wines, and the demand for older used barrels increasing, we now trade heavily in used barrels.  We buy more than any other cooper.

“Then, on the other hand, we must innovate.  Like we’re keeping a very close eye, through our French connection, on this new demand for egg-shaped or amphorae-shaped oaks.”

And the current fad among the bearded winemakers who insist ceramic amphorae are the go?  Is he looking for a claypit?

“Nah.”

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