Tonnellerie Blanchard (Loire)

Jacky Blanchard in the CooperageVineuil, Loire
Tonnellerie Blanchard (now Tonnellerie du Val de Loire - means "Loire Valley Cooperage")
Here is a cooperage which in spite of its lauded products is still largely under the radar, for the general public, at least, because many clients names, from the Loire to Bordeaux and Burgundy sound familiar.
If Mr Jacky had been a Japanese, he'd probably be a Living National Treasure because as a skillful handicraft-master, he understands many mysteries of the Art of cooperage and of the underlying implications of wood grades and qualities. He has been working since the age of 15 in what was then his father's cooperage, founded in Vineuil (Loire) in 1932. Initially a wine broker (an intermediary between the vignerons and the Negoce), his father opened his cask-making business and hired several employees, selling the barriques to the vignerons and the Negoce of the region. Casks were still ahead of bottlings then and there were many small-size cooperages all over the country. The Blanchard Copperage retained during all these years its artisanal spirit and expertise, and it sells its casks to demanding vintners and estates of the Loire, Burgundy and Bordeaux. The cooperage is located in Vineuil, a village south of the Loire river on the other side from Blois. The name of this village says it all : Vineuil, or Vinolium comes from Vino-ialo in the ancient Gaulish-language (which is close to Latin), which means "where the vineyards are located". The vineyards of the village proper were uprooted in favor of other cultures or for construction (Blois is so close) but the cooperage remained and the next Appellation is Cheverny, some 10 kilometers away.

Holding an Asse.....just an old Tool designed to Repair the inside of Casks Although I regularly spotted Blanchard casks in estates where the word quality means something, I didn't fall upon much information on the Internet from this small cooperage. No marketing needed here, this is a "Mom and Pop" company with no shortage of clients. When I visited Thierry Villemade last winter in Cheverny he warmly recommended that I pay them a visit. In his own words, Jacky Blanchard has a long experience regarding the subtle interaction between wood qualities and wine, and the result is cask types that fit exactly the wines they are set for. As we're chatting a few minutes in his office, which has this Cohen-brothers 1950s' feel (more Rodolex than PC), I realize that he likes to speak about the pre-cooperage stages of the wood, the silent growth and the selection of the trees. I'm learning more about the little-know World of the wood brokers in France, and I also learn a few new words here btw, like the exact name of the professionnal who selects and cuts the wood, the one who works one step upstream from the cooperage : in French, a merraindier. I also learn the distinction between a"haute futaie" oaktree and a "futaie" one : Haute futaie refers to a tree aged between 100 and 150, and a futaie is less than 100 hundred years old.
The key of the success for the selection of the wood lies with these people, the "merraindiers" who will make the right choice (most of the time, blind : the tree still standing on its roots).
And another central actor in this story is the mighty Office National des Forêts (ONF), the French Administration that manages the huge state-owned forested areas in France and most of the wood sales, including for wood originating from private forests. France is maybe the European country which has the best-preserved forests, and the ONF can be credited for that because it takes care that cutting and replanting go along and work for the long term. 28 % of France's surface is made of forests and woods, this makes 15,5 million hectares and it is growing by 40 000 hectares a year (see this page-in French). France is said to hold 40 % of all forests in the European Community. Now, if one third of French forests are publicly-owned, the ONF still manages 80 % of standing-wood sales and you get to know from the local ONF branches where the next sales will occur, because the cutters (mérraindiers) can then go see and check the selected and marked trees in the forest before they're sawed. Complicated process indeed and that may be why there are virtually no foreign buyers in these sales. The sales are of the auction type and you can theorically check on the ONF website for the next scheduled wood auctions online (see chapter : Consulter l'offre de bois en ligne) after you followed the registration.The Pendulum Movement of the JointeuseOnce the tree has been selected by the potential buyer in the forest, he knows that it will fit such or such use, including if quality requirements are met, for a cooperage. At Blanchard, they have been buying their wood mostly from a local wood company which has learned to know exactly the type of wood they need and buys its wood in the Central France forests. Jacky Blanchard says that the wood brokers are sometimes surprised to learn that a wood quality that they considered as compatible with cask-making is viewed as unfit by the cooperage. The wood quality is measured with several parameters, one of which being its texture and grain. It will have a direct imprint on the wine and that's why making the right choice at this stage will mean a lot for the vintner at the end of the chain, especially for those who don't want a gross wooding of their wines. By the way, speaking of wood qualities, even the usual GF (Grain Fin, or thin grain), GG (Gros Grain, or thick grain) and GM (Grain Moyen or middle grain) aren't absolute gradings, and what is sometimes for example graded GM by a wood broker is a mere GG by the cooperage.Manually Assembling the StavesThe wood is kept 24 months for drying before going into the cask workshop. We walk through the cooperage : it looks probably very close to what it looked like in the mid-20th century. In spite of this artisan look, the cooperage has an output capacity of 300 to 350 casks a year. Many of the wood working machines date from 1942 or 1943, very far from the modern and automated cooperage machines. Jacky Blanchard says that the modern machines may have a few automatisation gadgets but they don't do a better job than these old ones. He also remarked that the welded parts of the modern machines transmit unwanted vibrations to the wood, when the cast iron of the old ones absorbs them. As he sold his cooperage to the wood cutting company which had been providing him with wood for years (also a deeply-rooted family business of the region), the cooperage will be transferred in new buildings a couple kilometers away, some machine will come along, some will not. Right now, he is transmitting his know-how in the setting of his familiar workshop before retiring for good.
Speaking of 1942-1943, he says that during the German occupation, as the Germans viewed the cooperages as vital for their own needs, they exempted the cooperage workers from the STO, the compulsory work in Germany. He says that whenever an enlisted German soldier happened to be a cooperage worker in the civilian life, his officers sometimes detached him from his military duty to let him work in the nearest French cooperage. That's how two German coopers landed in a cooperage near Contres, a village of the Loire valley nearby. There was actually an unexpected know-how exchange as these coopers were expert on foudres (big-capacity casks). an Order of 228-liter Burgundy CasksThe most important parts of the cask are the staves, these long wood pieces which, bound together with steel hoops, form the belly of the cask all around. They must be worked the right way, tight enough so that the liquid inside doesn't leak (it will be filled with water before its vinous use to let the wood "drink" get tighter) . These staves must have gone through the right drying, be from the right oaktree with the right age, a "Senonches" like on the picture on the upper page, left), a "Tronçais" or a "Bercé", several sought-after french forests. Jacky Blanchard uses his eyes, his fingers and his smell [picture upper-page, right], even his ears to check the readyness of the staves for the cask building : for example when he begins to assemble a cask, he drops a stave vertically on the cement ground, listening on its sound as it bounces back. The steel hoops that he uses to assemble a cask are not the final ones, these are thinner ones designed to do a precise job. Then, other hoops, also temporary, will be used for the different manipulations on the assembled cask in the machines, then the final hoops will be fixed.
But I'm going too fast : the staves go through multiple works and machines before being fit for the final assembly line :
first, it get its right length throuh a machine called "écourteuse", to shorten the staves a bit.
Then it goes through the "dolleuse-évideuse", where it get the outside polished and shaped. The interior of the stave is also lightly carved with the same machine.
Then, we go to the "jointeuse" (jointer) [third pic above]. Very important stage : this seemingly simple machine with a pendulum movement makes the right narrowing of the staves. The narrowing-differential between each side of the same stave, the widest point being positionned at a different level on each side of the same stave [see pic on the right], helps detemine the progressivity of the cask's belly.
After that (if I didn't miss something), the staves will be ready for assembling.
After the cask has been assembled, other machines help finish and better the inside, especially the part near the extremities. There's a old machine here that has several blades working in rotation on the inside of the cask (near the botton and top), to better the tightness of the future cask. This machine also dates from the 1940s' and the modern equivalents are designed in a way that they don't allow such a good work. I was advised not publish a detailed picture of this multi-blade system and I can understand that... The Silent Companion : SyriusI'll not witness the heating/toasting of the inside of the casks this time. It is done with a small wood-chips fire set in a chaufferette, while the two flat extremities are not fixed yet. Jacky Blanchard usually puts a lid on a just-toasted cask as it helps keep the heat in the wood so that its fibers better integrate the heating. There was such a covered cask in the workshop which had been toasted the previous days (medium toast). I took the lid off and put my nose in the opening : it smelled strikingly the gingerbread. Nice feeling.
While the Blanchard casks are sold also in the Loire (Puzelat, Villemade, Bois Lucas), the core of its clientele is in Burgundy and Bordeaux, like for example the Maison Albert Bichot in Beaune. I'll try to get permission to name other famous estates from these regions which buy their casks. An order has also been delivered recently to the United States.
As said earlier, the Tonnellerie Blanchard (now "Tonnellerie de Val de Loire", or "Loire Valley Cooperage" in French) is being bought by the family company which has been selecting Blanchard woods for years. Jacky Blanchard, who is on his way to retirement, still works in the cooperage to transmit all his know-how and recipes to the new team. The cooperage will relocate in the near future to the mother-company facilities, which lie a couple of kilometers away.Tonnellerie du Val de Loire139 Avenue des Noels41350 Vineuilphone : +33 2 54 42 60 25fax : +33 2 54 42 07 63

Comments

[hikalu]

It's a nice post. It's interesting. I was googling about making cask in Japan. And there are some cask makers in here too, for Sake, Soy sauce, Whiskey, and some products. They aren't many, but there are some to inherit the tradition. It says To making cask, It needs the eyes to observe the behavior of each woods. It seems very difficult and need time to acquired that.

[Caitlin]

Thank you for this very interesting posting. It is wonderful to know that wine making traditions such as these are being kept alive by skilled craftsmen like Jacky Blanchard. The wine shop where I work in Chicago has several used barrels set up as decoration in the tasting/private events room. You can see them in the events tour video here

http://www.justgrapes.net/cellar.asp

I knew that the barrels were very expensive and I can see why after learning about all of the care and skill that goes into the art of cooperage.

Here's a wine making event I thought I'd mention.

http://www.justgrapes.net/istar.asp?a=6&id=BARREL!MISC

Now I'm curious about where the barrels will be coming from!

[Steven Plant]

Just wondering if he is related to the natural wine maker in the Touraine, Loire, Francois Blanchard?

[Bertrand]

No, as far as I know, there is no relation with this vintner.