New products from old wine barrels

 In the tidy seclusion of his carpentry shop, a 17-year-old Palma High School senior maneuvers a hand planer as he tools one of the area's newest businesses.

"I'm calling it 'Wine Barrel Woodworks,'" Blake Walter said.

He handed a visitor one of his business cards.

What Walter does begins with him scavenging valley vineyards in search of old barrels. He finds plenty, and the vineyards usually give them to him for free.

In his back yard, using a blue chisel and hammer, Walter removes each barrel's six galvanized steel bands.

He then works the wood to make various items, which he sells.

"I'd been thinking about starting this business for a long time," Walter said. "About two months ago, I finally felt like I could do it.

"So I got an old wine barrel. I took it apart and started making stuff."

It's a green business, too, in the sense that Walter uses no new lumber to create his products.

A high-pitched, bee-like buzz blared from tools Walter used to remove the debris on the wood's outer surface, under which lays the clean grain.

A fragrant shower of sawdust accompanied the effort and sprinkled across the floor.

"It's great wood," Walter said.

The barrel staves are white oak. A sturdy, hard material, the oak polishes to a fine finish. If the concave side of a stave has been in touch with red wine, that produces a pleasant purple hue in the wood.

If a stave has been in touch with white wine, the color tends toward brown.

Walter crafts candle holders and centerpieces and wine bottle holders and sells his products at farmers markets in the Toro area and in Salinas and Monterey.

"I'm working on a lot of ideas," he said. "I'm trying to branch out, trying to move into serving trays and baskets, too."

Wherever Walter goes, he notices items which could, in altered form, lend themselves to designs for his product line.

"Now that I'm into this, I see ideas everywhere," he said. "I don't really have to look. They just stand out."

Walter is the son of Gary and Carolyn Walter. He became intrigued with wood as a 5-year-old. He gleaned the basics of wood-craft when he started hanging out in his father's shop.

When he was 8, he made 40 Christmas Grinch-like plywood cutouts, which neighbors bought for $10 each.

"About every other house around here has one of those cutouts," Gary Walter said.

Besides classes at Palma, Blake Walter also goes to Mission Trails ROP at Salinas High School, where he learns welding and fabricating and other skills.

"We have a lot of pride in what he's doing," Gary Walter said.

Blake Walter puts in about 20 hours a week in his shop at home.

"At first it was, 'Oh, I have to go to work,'" Walter said. "Now I find it enjoyable. I'm making money and I'm getting it right."

He remembers several weeks ago when a customer at a farmers market first responded to an item that he'd made and bought it from him.

"It was the best feeling," Walter said. "You work so hard. Then you get that payback. All the work you've done finally comes together."

His business effort has taught him much more than how to make a candleholder out of a piece of old barrel oak.

"There's the marketing, too," he said. "There's the business, the labor. Then working with the wood is interesting."

Where Wine Barrel Woodworks will take him remains uncertain, but Walter plans to stay with it as long as it's doing well. He's thinking of attending Monterey Peninsula College and, at the same time, seeing how his business goes.

For example, he's looking to open a merchant account at a bank so he can tap into Internet sales and have customers, using credit cards, pay online.

"If my little company takes off, I guess I'll go with that," he said.