A drink with… Alistair Simms
Decanter speaks to Alistair Simms, one of the last remaining master coopers in England, about the increasing demand for homegrown wood among English winemakers.
The craft of barrel (or, to use the general term, cask) making has been dying out in Britain, after breweries ditched hand-crafted wooden vessels for cheaper metal kegs. But could the booming UK wine industry, and a growing interest in using home-made barrels crafted from home-grown oak, reverse this trend?
‘I started making some casks for a nearby winery in 2006, when I worked for Wadworth Brewery in Wiltshire, but that was with French oak. It was a passion of mine to make some from English oak, but it took time to find someone who could cut the wood in the right way for wine.
‘Since then, we’ve made about a dozen wine casks out of English oak, including for Gusbourne Estate and Chapel Down. At the moment, we’re working on an order for Williams Family Wines in Cambridgeshire.
’It’s understandable that English wineries are wanting to use English oak barrels. Everybody wants things that are local and sustainable. If you’re pulling in wood from all over the world, you have to think carefully about your carbon footprint.
‘We have two suppliers of English oak – one in Staffordshire and the other in east Yorkshire. Both are the same variety of oak (Quercus robur) but they have very different flavours. The Staffordshire oak you could use on white wine, but the Yorkshire would be better for a full-bodied red.
‘The Staffordshire one has notes of very green apple on the front, followed by hedgerow fruit like blackberries and bilberries. It’s similar to French oak but not quite as mouth-drying. We’ve not tried wine from it yet but, for whiskies, it brings out caramel and toffee apple flavours if you give the cask a medium toast.
‘The Yorkshire oak has flavours of green apple but not as fresh as the Staffordshire. It’s subtler, with more pronounced hedgerow fruit, and vanilla notes.
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‘The difference is down to the grains, the way it’s grown, and the flavouring we put on the oak when we toast it. Most of the wood we’re using is around 120 years old.
‘I can tell different types of oak by chewing on pieces of them. It’s the first thing I do when we get some new oak. I was with a timber merchant once. They had German, French and English oak but didn’t know which was which, so I tasted them and told them.
‘I don’t know much about wine, though, so it’s like going back to school. We have a French man doing the wine cask sales for us. Being a proper broad Yorkshireman, I need him to translate things into plain English for me – none of this flowery stuff.
‘We do everything by hand, so each cask is unique. Most cooperages in France and America will be using machines now. Very few make them by hand like we do.
‘The cooperage industry in the UK isn’t healthy currently. There are just five of us left working in England and only three master coopers (which means you’ve trained an apprentice). All three of us work for the same company: Kingsborough Coopers. But growth in demand from the English whisky and rum industry has helped, and we think English wine will be next.
‘We also make casks for films. I made about 1,000 for the Moby-Dick film, In the Heart of the Sea. We got to meet Chris Hemsworth too. He was a nice chap. We offered him a beer but he said 10am was a bit early.
‘I started working at age 14 when I got a job at the local brewery sweeping the yard. The cooper wanted a hand and it went from there. The training took four years but you haven’t finished learning by then. I’ve been doing it for 46 years and I’m still learning every day.
‘When you go from being an apprentice to a cooper in England, you go through a trussing ceremony. You make a hogshead (a 54-gallon beer cask), then the four most recently graduated coopers put you in and bend and hammer it into shape while you’re in there. It’s really noisy and you have to hope you made it right so it doesn’t break. Then, they pour in stale ale, yeast, hops, shavings off the shop floor – anything they can find. It used to be the bucket from the toilet, but we’re not allowed to do that anymore.
‘You sit in there and they tip it onto its side and take you for a spin round the yard. They used to throw you in the air and shout “Trusso!” – but they’ve stopped that now too. Since I had my ceremony, I’ve trussed three apprentices myself. While you’re in there, you have to think: “I’ll get my own back one day.”
‘It’s a tough career but I can’t ever see myself retiring. I’ll carry on until I die if I can.’
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A freelance journalist in travel, wine and food, Marianna is happiest when writing about travelling to wine destinations, with some of her favourites being Alto Adige in Italy, Priorat in Spain and Kakheti in Georgia.