Where have all the oak casks gone?
Ian Hickinbotham
Australian Plonky by Ian Hickinbotham [©Papinian Publishing]
I still shudder whenever I walk past a cask in a winery.
When I was an apprentice, because I was the smallest cellarhand, it was my job to crawl through the man-hole door of casks to clean them. They were 2,200 or 3,400 litre oak vessels, not, of course, the bag-in-the-box wine containers defined as ‘tablecasks’, an Australian coined word (though it seems to have drifted to just ‘casks’).
That last change has been possible because you virtually never see 'real' casks in Australian wineries nowadays: rather they are the bastions of stainless steel tanks. It was not always so: sixty years ago it was possible to stand at the top of the stairwell of Coles, the famous wine merchants of Geelong, and see scores of them. (Local oenophiles still smart about their city council allowing those cellars to be replaced by a public car park.)
Today, it may seem odd that a premium wine cellar was sited in Geelong, Victoria’s second city. Even as recently as 1950, oenology students (from the only teaching facility of the time at Roseworthy in South Australia), when touring Victorian wine regions, used to divert from Great Western to Geelong specifically to visit Coles.
When Melbourne was the richest capital city of the world, gold and subsequent prosperity of the sheep-bearing western district of Victoria led to Geelong’s prosperity through shipping and wool handling, so today, a major regional tourist attraction is indeed the Wool Museum. Phylloxera, the louse that killed most of the vineyards of Europe around 1870, entered Australia through Geelong, and its surrounding vineyards were soon destroyed, but it is heartening that a renaissance of Geelong premium winegrowing has occurred some 110 years later.
Nowadays, Australian winemakers know little about wooden casks and how to husband them. Instead the typical local winery is dominated by stainless steel, which somehow does not present the same ambience. Modern oenologists do not know how to care for casks, which, unlike barriques and barrels, which hold less than 300 litres of wine, are almost permanent containers used for generations, unless they have served a stint in Europe.
Casks are even used for special component wines of Champagne. For this role, unlike for the maturing of a dry red wine, ‘tannins’ derived from oak are certainly not wanted, which automatically means the ‘tannins’ have long been extracted from the casks’ oak by white wines or previous vintages.
This does not mean you will not see casks in some cellars. Aside from a small trend of embracing them for white wine maturing, winemakers sometimes install them for appearance. (The late Leo Buring used to pay children sixpence per spider and install them in his Sydney cellars to produce the required cobwebs, while Spanish winemakers made a fetish out of allowing wax from burning candles to accumulate on cellar tables as an added ‘look of age’ for tourists.)
When Burgoynes, the English winemaking firm, closed in Rutherglen some 60 years ago, their casks were purchased for show. I remember looking at the back of one installed in a Barossa Valley winery cellar. It had been eaten out by white ants.
I had been prompted to look, because, being an oenologist, I tapped the cask-head when walking past it, only to get an echoing sound. Interestingly, I did the same to the barriques in the cellar of the palace of Louis IV in Versailles near Paris when visiting and was shocked by the same hollow sound of emptiness...
Ian Hickinbotham, one of the most innovative and influential oenologists in Australia over his 50 year career, is the author of Australian Plonky (see related review below).
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