First of all, alcohol and water, the two major components of any spirit, are both solvents when you leave them in a barrel long enough they will leach out tannins-tangy and bitter-and other compounds from the wood, including some that add vanilla notes and perceived sweetness.īut setting aside vodka and some kinds of white rum, most spirits also contain significant amounts of “congeners”-compounds that pass through the still along with the aforementioned C2H5OH and H2O.
These linked reactions are far too complex to explain here in any detail, but I’ll at least skim through the basics. Nowadays, we call it aging: the complex triple-whammy of extraction, oxidation and concentration that turns raw firewater left in a wooden container into tawny, nectareous throat-oil. Often, the cumulative time in the barrel was long enough for another one of its properties to kick in. Then it would remain in barrels until it was parceled out for retail, although probably not the same ones: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dutch and English spirits-wholesalers pretty much blended, proof-adjusted, sweetened, colored and otherwise adulterated every drop of liquid that passed through their cellars. In any case, between distillation and landing in Amsterdam or London the new brandy would sit in those barriques for anything from three months, for one that was distilled late and sold early, to nine months or more (distilled early, sold late) before reaching the end user. The larger sizes-for wines and spirits, that generally means the 110-gallon pipe and 220-gallon butt-are tougher to handle, but by no means impossible. Best of all, for the barrique, at least, whether it’s empty or full, one person can move it, crabbing it along on the rim if it’s upright and rolling it along handily if it’s on its side, pivoting it through the turns with no trouble at all. It will float when it’s empty and it will still float when it’s full, which means you don’t even need a dock to get it on a boat (an amphora, on the other hand, makes a pretty fair anchor). It’s strong (you just have to look at an amphora slantways and it will break). It’s light-at least, compared to the clay amphora against which it competed. They would be floated downriver on flatboats to Tonnay-Charente, near the river’s mouth, or further on up the coast to La Rochelle, and then warehoused until the spring storms subsided in the Bay of Biscay, at which point the Dutch and English customers arrived to roll them into their ships and take them home.Īs a piece of design, the genius of the wooden barrel can scarcely be overstated. These might be new or they might be old, having been returned from market for reuse. The way things worked in Cognac, the grapes would be harvested in the fall and pressed into wine, which would be distilled throughout the winter, with the new spirit going right into barriques-the fairly small, maneuverable 54-gallon barrel traditionally used for shipping Bordeaux wines. The last thing you wanted was to leave product sitting around in them until they got old and dusty.
To the seventeenth-century pioneers of Cognac distilling, oak barrels were what they had always been, ever since the Celts came up with them some 1500-odd years before: pure and simple, they were shipping containers. Denis is this ridiculous amount of inventory doing gathering dust in the warehouse? “Sacré bleu!” Monsieur Serazin would say, and “mais qu’est-ce que s’est passé ici? C’est un catastrophe!” Perturbed, he’d have a fusillade of questions: did the river silt up? Is there a naval blockade? Did some plague exterminate all the English and the Dutch? Because what in the Holy Name of St. If through some magic of modern physics you were able to reach back to the 1560s to take Jehan Serazin, a pioneer “marchand et faiseur d’eau de vie” (“merchant and maker of spirits”) from La Rochelle, and yoink him through time to the present and then drop him in the middle of one of the massive warehouse complexes in the middle of Cognac, he would be shocked. The resulting brandy was loaded onto barges and floated down the sleepy Charente river to the ports of Tonnay-Charente and La Rochelle, whence it would go to Amsterdam or London or other points north. In the mid-1500s, farmers in the rolling, chalk-soil wheat country around the French provincial town of Cognac began distilling the light white wine that they made from the grapes grown on the slopes too steep for their main crop.
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