The Pros and Cons of Working with a Small Artisan Cooperage

Whether you make wine for a large winery or a small one, you probably practice some level of artisan winemaking. It can feel like a dying art, but I try to help support it by giving winemakers the tools they need to keep their artisan wines artisan. 

While I love connecting winemakers with artisan cooperages, that doesn't mean it's the right fit for everyone. Like everything in life, there are pros and cons.

What you get with a high level of quality you may sacrifice in timeline or availability. But I am here to help you make the best wine, which is why I want share all your options.

Here are pros and cons to both sides. May the odds be in the artists' favor!

Here are 5 pros and 5 cons to working with small artisan cooperages:

You can use this breakdown as a rough guideline for understanding cooperage sizes based on number of barrels produced per year.

1,000-5,000 = small
10,000-25,000 = medium
30,000-80,000 = large

CONS:

1) Small production = limited availability

If you work for a large winery that orders 1,000+ barrels from just a couple of cooperages, a small cooperage might struggle to keep up with your orders. You don’t want to be left high and dry at harvest time. Understandable.

2) Pricing

If you have to prioritize pricing over quality, a small cooperage will likely not have the lowest prices on the market. But don’t assume it will be the highest either. Some of them are surprisingly reasonable since their overhead costs can be much lower.

3) Will the cooperage survive?

Unfortunately, small cooperages are becoming a dying breed. Rising oak prices and decreasing supply means they are losing access to high quality wood. Partnering up with a big cooperage or wood buyer is becoming a necessity for these smaller cooperages.

To help determine the fate of a cooperage you are considering, here are some questions to ask:

• From whom do you buy your oak?
• How secure are those relationships and why are they secure?
• Are you buying the wood as raw staves and seasoning them yourself, or are you buying them already seasoned?

Essentially you want to know how much control they have over the continued supply and quality of the wood.

The good news is that a partnership with a large company doesn't guarantee a death sentence for the cooperage's former self. It might actually be more valuable to the large company if the cooperage remains small and artisan.

4) Potential risk to wine safety

Maybe this should be #1, but I didn’t want to scare you. Small cooperages are generally as safe as larger ones, but to be certain, it’s actually easy to assess. Simply ask the cooperage about their TCA/TBA testing for both barrels and containers. You might even be able to see a certificate for the batch containing your barrels.

Don’t expect every barrel to be tested though. It’s standard for cooperages to test in batches – perhaps 10 at time. And if there does turn out to be a problem, they will go back to the batch and test every barrel.

5) It's outside your comfort zone

If you simply feel more comfortable using the tried and true brands – the barrels everyone else uses – that’s completely understandable. But some of these small cooperages have been around for decades, some for more than a century!

They might be new to the U.S. market and previously just sold locally, so ask for a list of client references in their own territory. You might be impressed!

PROS:

1) Consistency

I understand this is debatable, but here’s a fact:

When a cooperage produces 5,000 barrels per year or less, only one person is needed to toast the barrels.

When people complain about barrels being inconsistent, they’re usually talking about the toast. Back when winemaker Nick Goldschmidt was at Simi, he ran a trial to measure the differences between barrels from different forests and cooperages. He concluded that the individual cooper (the person toasting the barrels) had more of an influence on a finished wine’s taste than the geographic source of the wood.

In 2015, I met with Thomas Collins who used to be the head of R & D at Treasury Wine Estates. He had conducted years of extensive trials on the most common barrel variations - forests, toasts, grain types, seasoning, etc. - but was frustrated to find that toasting was so inconsistent, it was impossible to get a read on anything else.

Toasting plays such an important role in the taste of a barrel and is prone to inconsistency. If having only one person toasting the barrels increases consistency, wouldn’t this be ideal?

2) Hand-crafted = high quality

Just as with wine, there are processes in the cooperage that when done by hand can lead to better quality barrels. These include wood selection, toasting, stave joining, hoop positioning, sanding and finishing.

It takes three times as long for a small cooperage to make one barrel than a large cooperage. This is because so much of the production is done by hand rather than by machine.

It’s not that the larger cooperages rely solely on machines. They just have to use them more to produce the larger quantities.

HUMAN VS. MACHINE TOASTING

Some cooperages claim their machine-toasted barrels are more consistent. Seems logical if the main source for variation comes from humans. However, a trained cooper can assess external factors that are always fluctuating – outside temperature, humidity, wind, etc. – and he can correct course along the way. A machine might not be as flexible.

The heart of a cooper's training lies in artisanal methods. There are cooperage schools, extensive networks for apprenticing and major competitions (Best French Artisan and Best Apprentice, for example). As the final test, an apprentice cooper has to build a barrel 100% by hand. Coopering is meant to be an artisan craft.

A cooper uses his eyes and nose to guide him, and by paying close attention to his senses, he knows when the barrel is toasted just right. A good cooper puts the art in “artisan.”

3) Unique small forest selections

It’s not as easy for large cooperages to offer small forest selections and be able to get that same oak year after year unless they greatly limit availability for those particular barrels. There just isn't enough oak from those forests to accommodate all their customers.

Large cooperages need to source wood from many different regions or one large region and blend it together. They homogenize the flavors and characters of the wood so there will be consistency from year to year.

Since small cooperages don’t mass-produce barrels, they can get wood from a few small sources, keep those batches separate and continue to offer those unique barrel selections year after year.

4) Perfectionism, starting with seasoning

An artisan cooper is proud of his work – maybe it's even his name on the barrels. Because he's a craftsman, he wants his barrels to be perfect. And it all begins with the seasoning.

In an ideal world, every stack of wood would be left outside as long as necessary to get the perfect amount of rain. But that's not always cost-efficient or practical. A small cooperage is likely to be more concerned (even obsessed) with quality rather than practicality. Each stack of wood can be monitored closely, and if some wood needs to be seasoned longer (i.e., in a dry year), it will be.

A small cooperage also has more flexibility on how it seasons the wood. For example, “chimney” or “open” stacking is a method in which the center of the stack is left open. This allows for better airflow and therefore more thorough seasoning. But it’s certainly not the most cost efficient.

It's not that wood won’t be seasoned properly at a large cooperage – it just means a large cooperage can’t be a perfectionist about it.

5) Customization

Have you ever tasted a barrel at someone else’s winery and love it, but then when you try it on your wine you’re a little disappointed? A barrel can taste very different from one wine to the next, even on the same wine vintage to vintage.

If you’re crafting artisan wines as an expression of your vision and to show the true nature of your vineyard, you might benefit from a more custom barrel. An artisan cooper is more likely to take the time to get to know your wine and then craft a barrel that brings out the best qualities of YOUR particular wine.

To sum it all up...

If you’re ordering 1,000+ barrels and pricing is a top priority, mass-production cooperages may be your best bet. But if you’re crafting artisan wines as an expression of your vision, a smaller, more artisan cooperage can offer a level of customization and quality you simply can’t get from the larger cooperages.

And even if you are a large buyer or prefer a large cooperage, consider saving a little room for fun and experimentation in your small-batch wines for some more boutique barrels. You might be delighted by the results!