Marc Grenier Cooperage (Burgundy)(4)
By Bertrand Celce 2009-3-4 15:11:48
Another difference with the other tonnelleries is that Marc Grenier buys the wood to a wood cutter, often whole trees having gone through a minimal preparation. Cask makers usually buy ready-to-use staves to a mérandier who has already selected the useable wood. He will have much more waste (40% to 50%) because he has to select himself the right wood parts across the rough boards. He says that choosing where in the rough boards to carve out the staves is already an arduous exercise that asks for a good knowledge of the tree wood-texture in the context of a whole tree. Even after having been delivered by the sawmill, the wood will go through a long preparation before being worked and assembled in a vat.First, it is stored for quite a long time outside as Marc Grenier wants it to have dried naturally in the open for three years before working on it. Then it will go through several successive transformations spaced in time.He makes sure that his workers always keep the workshop, the vats and the staves immaculate. The first reason is that the vats have to remain free of stains or dust that could have a negative incidence on the wine. Pointing to the 9000-liter vat above, if it is later filled with a 30-Euro/liter Pommard, you get a 270 000-Euro load of wine that could suffer if the wood was not properly handled. He takes the example of the Romanée Conti for which he made some 25 wooden vats along the years.The second reason is that the French-administration agents who check the sanitation rules on the workplace are not complacent and always find new details to criticize the installations for health concerns, and ask for new investments. He says that the new obsession of the administration is oak dust, it's like "there's saw dust on the ground, everyone is going to get cancer"...
Marc Grenier says that he has sometimes to accompany the vats to the customer's winery with a worker and to build up the vats again inside the cellar, when its door is too narrow for a normal delivery, which is often the case in historic cellars. This additional work is not always possible because of the impending workload of the cooperage. Normally, such a vat is like a cask and can be set apart and reassembled by a skilled cooper.
Back to the wood : it arrives from the sawmill after having barely sliced into boards, sometimes it has been cut 6 months before. It will keep being exposed in the open and dry slowly for at least 2 years, or 2 years and a half in total, then, it will gradually be worked upon for several more months before arriving on the assembly line. Marc Grenier says that the natural drying in the open, under the weather conditions of rain and temperature changes through the seasons is essential for the quality of a vat or a foudre. Wood is a living material, it needs time to adapt and its readyness must not be accelerated.The nearly-black aspect of the tree above is misleading : when the wood will be worked-upon and planed, its beautiful, vibrant oak colors will shine again.The selected trees are of the haute-futaie category, meaning they are 150 years old. As said in an earlier post, the wood sales from the French forests, both private and state owned, are managed by the French Forest Administration, the ONF. The ONF tree sales are closely monitored by the sawmills working for the cooperages and the trees are usually selected by the buyer even before having been cut down.The ONF ties the wood cuttings to new plantations and over the years the French forests have kept growing in surface to reach an estimated 15,5 million hectares today, or 28% of France.
The boards and staves have numbers tagged on them because all the wood is checked against pesticides or chemical products. He scraps wood samples for each purchased tree and gets it analyzed at a laboratory in Beaune. The tagged codes help trace the wood to the purchased tree and to the lab checks. But the sawmill people where he buys his wood select only chemicals-free trees for him and the checks are just a security routine. But it is interesting to know that pesticides and various chemicals can find their way into trees. It has to do with trees growing along fields, and the chemicals found by the labs are sometimes pesticides that are no longer in use, but were common in the 60s' or 70s'. That's why choosing the tree, preferably in the millde of a forest, is an important step when dealing with casks or vats.
For the story, Marc Grenier, who has seven brothers and sisters, was not at all in the wine/cooperage world initially. One day, as a youth, he came in the region to work as a picker for the harvest and met a beautiful girl among the pickers who was to become his wife. A Haute-Saone native, he had never seen a cask or a vat at the age of 21. But his grandfather inlaw was a cooper who repaired wooden vats for a living in Corberon and that was it...
The Marc-Grenier Foudrier cooperage takes part to the viticultural techniques, tools and machine fair in Angers,the SIVAL, which takes place a few days before the famed Loire wine fair there.
From wineterroirs.com