September 8, 2017
CapitalPress.com
11
Cooper looks to NW oak for barrels
By MARGARETT WATERBURY
For the Capital Press
Ask most people what
wine’s most important in-
gredient is, and they’ll say
grapes. Ask Rick DiFerra-
ri, owner of McMinnville’s
Oregon Barrel Works, and
you might get a different
answer.
DiFerrari founded Oregon
Barrel Works in 2000, but
the company’s roots go back
to the managed oak forests
of France, where DiFerrari
learned the ancient art of coo-
pering. After earning a degree
in forestry and working in
Alaska, DiFerrari took a trip
to Europe in 1992, where he
ended up visiting a couple of
cooperages in France.
Intrigued by the intersec-
tion of forestry and viticul-
ture, he ended up extending
his trip by a year and a half,
taking on an apprenticeship
at Francois Freres, a famous
cooperage in Burgundy.
At
Francois
Freres,
DiFerrari worked exclusively
with French oak, but when he
returned to Oregon in 1993,
he started to wonder: Could
he make barrels from native
Oregon oak (Quercus gar-
ryana)? DiFerrari partnered
with Francois Freres to test
his idea, cutting and aging
staves from Oregon oak at his
own facility in Oregon and
then shipping them to Demp-
tos, a California cooperage
owned by Francois Freres.
His first Oregon oak bar-
rels hit the market in 1996
and 1997. “The initial re-
sponse was really good,” says
DiFerrari. “A lot of people
were excited about using a
product grown here.”
In the early 2000s, DiFer-
rari started building the bar-
rels on his own, transforming
Oregon Barrel Works from a
Martin Woods Winery.
Pinot noir ages in an Oregon oak barrel at Martin Woods Winery in
McMinnville, Ore.
stave mill into a full-fledged
cooperage. DiFerrari says
working with Oregon oak is
much different than working
with French oak.
“The wood is really dense
and hard,” says DiFerrari. “It
dulls all our planers really
quickly. But, in a strange way,
it’s easy to bend; we break
very few staves. French oak
is much lighter, not as dense,
easier to run through equip-
ment, but also more fragile.”
The impact of Oregon
oak on wine and spirits is
also much different than the
impact of French oak. Evan
Martin, owner and winemak-
er at Martin Woods Winery,
uses almost exclusively Or-
egon oak casks in his cellar,
and says the wood gives wine
a unique texture and mouth
feel.
“There’s an incredible fo-
cus and tension in the wine,”
says Martin. “Where the
French wood is very broad,
the tannins reach out to the
sides and are very mouth-fill-
ing, the Oregon oak is almost
like a laser focus shooting
through the middle.”
Brian O’Donnell, owner
and winemaker at Belle Pente,
uses half Oregon oak and half
French oak to age his Char-
donnay.
While some describe Ore-
gon Oak as spicy and aggres-
sive, he says its influence on
Chardonnay is actually quite
refined.
“The things it imparts in
Chardonnay are a little bit
of hazelnut character,” says
O’Donnell. “It helps elevate
some of the tropical char-
acteristics we get: coconut,
pineapple, mango.”
This year, DiFerrari esti-
mates he’ll make about 400
Oregon oak casks, half of
which will go to the wine in-
dustry and half to the spirits
industry. The demand from
both sides is much higher, but
for DiFerrari, the drive to ex-
periment remains his primary
motivation. Now, he’s starting
to tinker with barrels made
from other Northwest woods.
“In Astoria, when they first
showed up here, they brought
a cooper. They had to be using
other Northwest woods,” says
DiFerrari. “So I’m not the first
person to think of it — I’m
just re-thinking it.”
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