People:
Mark Heinemann

Demptos-Napa Cooperage USA-Born and raised and lives in Northern California.

I was asked to do some top level research the other day for a potential client on the actual cost of a bottle of wine.  This topic is not straight forward and is fodder for a future story.  As a by-product of that research I got too close to the edge and fell into the wine barrel trap--the devil is in the detail as they say.  When it comes to wine barrels, I met a walking encyclopedia in Napa. 

He was born in Northern California, and then in 1969 he helped his dad plant a new 16 acre hillside Pinot Noir vineyard at age 7 and worked that vineyard until he left home at 18 to do an apprenticeship in the wine industry in Germany.  A year later he came home to attend UC-Davis on a Farm Bureau scholarship and obtained a degree in International Wine Marketing.

Mark Heinemann with Demptos Cooperage USA in Napa attended grade school and high school in St. Helena, CA and now calls Napa home.  As the old saying goes, acorns don’t fall far from the tree.  At 47 he has already spent 4 decades in the California wine industry and settled on the career and science of wine barrel making-cooperage is the preferred term.  Mark is a guy who knows the players in wine country personally, knows their wines very well, answers his own phone and to a fault, has forgotten more about barrels than most winemakers will ever know.

Mark is the Director of Sales for Demptos Cooperage USA, one of the oldest cooperage operations in the world (started in 1825); a publicly owned French company that is 80% owned by the original family.  In 1982 Demptos of France opened shop in Napa to manufacture and sell barrels made expressly for wine in the US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand.  These are not disassembled barrel parts sent to these markets and assembled, these are finished barrels; all made in Napa.  But remember, there are approximately 60 cooperage firms in France, 3 in Hungary and 16 in the US.  Until recently the preferred material for wine barrels was French White Oak.  The use of American White Oak started about 50 years ago. 

“I am obsessed with getting the right barrel to the right winemaker for a specific varietal and style,” said Mark.  “By right barrel I am talking about whether it is American, French and/or Hungarian Oak and how the new wood is toasted.”  (I called it firing, but who am I?)  My one opening question and Mark is now on a roll and proceeds to elaborate, with little further prompting from me, about wine barrel facts.  “At $885 for a 60 gallon French Oak barrel or $655 for Hungarian Oak or $395 for American White Oak, this is a sizable investment on the part of a winery.  When you cater to very high end producers that sell recognized premium wines, they trust the integrity of this significant product you produce that is vital to their wines’ character,” Mark continued.  “I am constantly tasting and evaluating the wines in our barrels to see how the barrels are working in relationship to the developing wines.”

Coincidently, (and stranger than fiction) my great-grandparents, grandparents and parents came from the small Southern Missouri town of Salem, Missouri.  According to Mark, some of the finest American Oak for wine is from around that area of Cuba and Salem, Missouri.  And it is Mark’s opinion that this is the finest wine barrel oak grown in America. “With their sustainable timber management practices, the LeRoy McGinness family will produce the finest oak for Demptos Cooperage USA well into the future,” said Mark.  As an aside, Mark tells me there are more White Oak trees in the US today than 30 years ago.  "Selective cutting, good forest management and natural reforestation have stabilized finer grained oaks in preferred growth regions like those found in Missouri, Hungary and France."

It takes roughly 32 staves to make a wine barrel and they don’t come pre-bent.  Demptos Cooperage USA makes approximately 100 barrels per day from French and American Oak for non-European and Southern Hemisphere wineries.  (I guess that is one reason there are so many wine barrels sawed in half and sold for flower planters when one considers 450,000 new wine barrels and 2.5 million bourbon barrels are made in the US. yearly.)   I found out from watching the experts build a barrel at Demptos, it would really help to have another pair of hands—there are a lot of moving staves, hoops and hammers to make a barrel.  Selecting the staves, putting the hoops in place, and then setting the partially finished barrel over an oak wood fire, is how the staves are naturally bent into shape.  This is the simplified explanation but it doesn’t explain the true complexity of the science behind a wine barrel.

Here is Mark’s sales pitch about the art and science of selling wine barrels. “We are unique because we make and sell high-end barrels for the world of fine wines.  Demptos Cooperage USA, after much experimentation, has sourced what we consider to be the finest oak woods from around Cuba, Missouri; our selected woods are air dried for up to 3 years in the natural heat, cold and humidity of Southern Missouri; I have the support of a dedicated research department in France who research oak in wine making; our stave bending is done with toasting over traditional oak fire; and the oak is hand selected specifically by grain (8 to 18 growth rings per inch).

Some of this research is self explanatory, but the issue of research is interesting.  I found out, it is the unique nature of wine oxidation that comes only from using oak, that is very important to winemakers.  Therefore, a lot of attention is given to wood structure and its chemistry: rates of oxidation, curing characteristics, and the molds that form on the oak because of the interaction with oaks natural sugars and how to set up the release of those sugars in the wine via the toasting process.  The molds living and dying on the oak takes place in a 24 month period and contributes heavily to wines delicate dry sweet rounded taste.  In fact, French oak is so renowned that it has its own terroir designations in 11 forests in France, by name and by grain selection.

Today, large 8 ton capacity oak fermenting tanks are sold at about 1 per day out of Brive, France.  These can replace the stainless steel tank fermentors and can be temperature controlled just like stainless steel.  Robert Mondavi made stainless steel famous and now they are coming full circle back to oak fermentation tanks.

Mark is careful to mention that the aromas and flavors in our favorite wines today are a product of: aging and seasoning of oak, oxidation of the wine, caramelized sugars toasted in the oak, the mold spores inherent in the sugar maturation in the wood, the minerals in the soil where the grapes come from, and, most importantly, the craftsmanship of the winemaker in bringing together all the elements of winemaking.  “It all starts with Mother Nature…growing healthy vines, developing complex, flavorful fruit paired with the Mighty Oak,” says Mark.