WINE IN WOOD

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 119, 13 February 1926, Page 22

WINE IN WOOD

The casks in which port and sherry are stored play no small part in developing their excellence. Nearly all wines owe much to the influence of the wood in which they are stored during their early years, and both sherry and tawny port spend the greater part of their existence in butt and pipe, is a statement made by Mr. IT. Warner Allen in the “Morning Post.”

The sherry butt is-,"really a work of art. It is made in the same way and by the same tools as have been used by the Coopers’ Guild for centuries. Sherry must be matured in American oak, and it is a marvel that the Spanish cooperages in which enormous piles of wood are packed in close proximity to little fires are not regularly burnt down. The tool mainly employed is a kind of hatchet, with an almost razorlike upper edge. It is very heavy, and to the unskilled incapable of manipulation, though the expert handles it with amazing ease. All the staves of the cask are shaped by hand, and they are eventually drawn together by the hoops when the wood has been warped by means of a little charcoal fire lit in the centre of the butt which is in the making. The trade is entirely in the hands of the Spanish Guild, though the cooperage niny be financed by the sherry shipper, and small boys are admitted into the mystery as apprentices.

The port pipe, on the other hand, is made of Baltic oak, and a good deal of labour-saving machinery lias been introduced. The wood is supplied by baths of compressed steam, and the staves arc drawn together by a special machine. The Oporto cooperages form, as a rule, part of the wine lodges, and are entirely under the direction of the port shipper. The coopers have recently been on strike very much against their will. Certain agitators have forced them to stop work in order to compel the shippers to abandon the practice of using again pipes returned empty from abroad. As far as the men are concerned, they like the work of inendine these returned casks, because it is a light job and well paid. It is generally believed .that the strike is due to revolutionary propaganda, which is not opposed by the interests concerned with the importation of wood into Portugal.