Back in 1996 Cal & Trish Craik were living and working in Vancouver; Cal as a Business Development Manager for a bonded warehousing operation and Trish as a full-time mother to their three young children.  One thing led to another and Cal found himself seeking new gainful employment.  Having looked at moving to the Okanagan Valley for some time, this intrepid pair packed up bag and baggage and moved to Oliver, the heart of the BC wine industry.

BOHICA BOXWORKS

Still having no job but needing to feed the kids and pay the mortgage, Cal began building and selling wooden gift boxes to the region’s wineries.
A high volume, low margin, subsistence living at best.  None the less, it was this connection to the wineries that would provide the platform on which to build the barrel business.

Over a wobbly pop with a neighbour one evening the conversation came around to the wine industry and how it was a shame that there was nobody in the Okanagan selling, repairing or refurbishing wine barrels.  The light went on.  A bit of research and a trip to Napa later, Cal was back in Oliver as the local representative for Demptos Napa Cooperage.  At the same time, Cal picked up a few used barrels and set to work figuring out how to take them apart and, more importantly, put them back together again.  This was followed by the design and construction of a purpose-built machine to shave out the inside of tired barrels to resurrect a bit more extractive life from them.

OKANAGAN BARREL WORKS LTD.

In 1998 a chance encounter with Chris Scott of Kaleden led to the incorporation of Okanagan Barrel Works Ltd.  Chris was (and still is!) a successful local businessman who had started importing small oak barrels from Central Europe aimed at the home winemaking and U-Vint market.  We decided to join forces and in July a retail outlet was established selling winemaking supplies and equipment out the front and barrel repair and servicing in the back.  Along with the Demptos and the small European barrels, the company explored other barrel opportunities such as French oak barrels coopered in Spain along with full sized barrels from the Czech Republic.  It was a learning process, not always painless.  The Czech barrels were a disaster that culminated in summoning the Managing Director of that cooperage out to Oliver to explain to us why we should continue buying his product.  He was unsuccessful in that venture.

Please note that there are some very good coopers in the Czech Republic that put out a very good product.  We just happened to have chosen the wrong one.

Life goes on and a phone call from the Coffee Industry Board of Jamaica one afternoon led the company to a new product line.  We were asked to submit a quote for slack (not water tight) barrels capable of holding 70 kg of coffee beans.  To make a long story a bit shorter, we are still supplying these barrels and to date have supplied in the neighbourhood of 20,000 of them for shipping the famous Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee beans around the world.

In an attempt to broaden our distribution of small barrels to the amateur market, we contacted a major wine kit manufacturer to see if they would carry our barrels in their catalogue.  Along with that request we sent a sample of a product under development – toasted oak chips in a nylon mesh bag to replace the plastic bags of oak powder normally supplied with the kits.  They declined to carry the barrels but did ask for a quote on 50, 100 and 200,000 of the oak T-bags!  One must remember that the sample was thrown in simply as a “what do you think of this” idea.  No research had been done on production or costing.  The sample was basically a bit of mesh sewn up on Trish’s sewing machine.  Thoughts of setting up a cottage industry of Oliver’s retired seamstresses making up thousands of these bags were quickly dashed after looking at the overall logistics.  We settled on a coffee filter paper sourced from Georgia, brought in bulk oak chips from Ohio, sent them off to a custom packaging facility in Vancouver and delivered the first 50,000 bags within 4 weeks of the initial request for a quote.  Soon afterwards we bought a sawmill-sized chipper to make our own chips and converted a gas-fired laundromat dryer to toast them.

To complete the package we also took on a line of laboratory and testing equipment for winemakers and became a local distribution centre for a supplier of winery pumps, tanks, presses, etc.

DOWNSIZING

As with many business ventures, too much too fast is not always a good thing.  The retail and non-barrel related items were a high inventory expense and had fairly slow turnover.  It was time to divest some baggage.  OBW relocated to smaller, more economical quarters and got rid of the retail, lab equipment and machinery.  We kept the chip business but that didn’t go over too well with the Town of Oliver when we moved the 50-HP chipper right into downtown!

The new digs were in the basement of the old fire hall on Main Street.  The owners of that building were meeting upstairs one evening trying to decide what to name the proposed restaurant planned for the main floor.  We had been toasting oak chips all day in the basement and when someone asked what that wonderful aroma was, the restaurant name was decided – The Toasted Oak.

RESTRUCTURING

One fine day in the summer or 2001, a delightful couple dropped into the shop for a little look-see at what we were up to.  They had a tour and we talked all about barrels and what the company was trying to accomplish.  Cal mentioned that he and Chris were looking at bringing in a working partner to help spread the work load.  There must have been a knowing glance between the two nice tourists because three days later, they called saying they would like to meet about buying into the business.  Welcome Nils and Sylvia Bodtker of Calgary.  Nils and Sylvia have built an extremely successful business called Great Western Containers, supplying steel and plastic barrels primarily to the oil industry.  Bodtker is a variation of the Scandinavian word for cooper (barrel maker) and Cal has since discovered that his great-great grandfather, William Greig, was a Scottish cooper back around 1870 or so. The stars and planets seem to be aligning.

A company was formed to buy the barrel related assets of Okanagan Barrel Works and Chris and Cal sold off the remaining portion of the original company.

THE RESURRECTION - OKANAGAN BARREL WORKS 2001 LTD.

Now we are really in the barrel business!  One of the first orders we put together was for a food supply business in Ontario that wanted display barrels for produce, etc.  They also wanted wooden hoops, not steel.  Undaunted by never having done that before, the crew went to work – ripping ¼” strips of oak, soaking them in a (new) horse trough then into a steam box for 20 minutes.  After bending them into shape in a round form to dry for 3 hours, the moisture content was such that, once fastened to the barrels, the failure rate was almost nil.  2500 barrels x 4 hoops per barrel…10,000 hoops made in this fashion.  Did we mention that they wanted the first 1000 in 6 weeks?  We did it with time to spare.

Next up was a quick trip to Jamaica to the coffee people. The flight home was very pleasant with a 7000 barrel Purchase Order in Cal’s pocket

Nils and Sylvia, without question the nicest people on the planet, were on a tour of Burgundy the next year and happened upon Tonnellerie de Mercurey.  Nils let it slip (accidentally of course) that he happened to be a partner in a small cooperage in Canada, and would TDM like to have us sell their barrels?
Mais oui! was the response and OBW now had a second line of high end French oak barrels in the portfolio to complement the Demptos barrels

PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS.

So here we are, a poor but honest little cooperage tucked away in one of the world’s tiniest wine regions.  But how could we call ourselves a true cooperage if we didn’t make our own oak wine barrels?  Taking an enormous leap of faith in Cal’s developing skills, and a trip to the US Midwest to dig up some ancient barrel making machinery, we brought in some stave and heading sets from a Kentucky cooperage and set about proving to ourselves that we could really do this.  We could and did.  Granted, those first barrels were a bit rough in comparison to what the cooperage now produces, but the quality of the extractive profile was very good and continues to be refined according to the needs of the winemaker.

A move to larger quarters was now a definite requirement and we shifted operations to our current location.  Starting with a 3200 sq.ft. shop, we have since expanded to almost 8,000 sq.ft. in three buildings.  Still small in comparison to “The Big Guys” but very adequate for our needs.

A BIG STEP FORWARD

Around the spring or summer of 2006 we received an email from a Mr. Eric Fourthon of Bordeaux, France asking if we had any need for an experienced Master Cooper.  Did we ever!  While our products were constantly improving and being well and more widely received, to this point nobody in the shop had had any formal training in making barrels.  Cal was very much self-taught and had passed that knowledge on to the shop workers, but there was so much more to learn.  We jumped through all the hoops required by Immigration and Human Resources Canada and Eric joined our staff in April 2007.  It was as if the heavens had opened and rained skill and knowledge down upon us.  In no time at all, Eric had whipped the shop into a far more productive and efficient operation.  He also refined the very critical toasting processes we had initially developed so that OBW barrels stand very high in blind tastings conducted by many world class winemakers.  We take a back seat to no one.

In our continuous efforts to work better and produce a better product, we managed to secure a 40’ container load of far more up-to-date equipment from a cooper in France who wanted to retire.  Eric spotted the listing on the internet the day it went on line and we snapped up the whole package that day.

One of Eric’s areas of expertise is the making of large volume oak tanks and vats so we built a shop just to make these.  The first tank of 6000 L was delivered in September of 2007 to Road 13 Winery in Oliver and since then we have delivered 18 more of various capacities around BC.  Most recently we have quoted on two 20,000 L tanks for Washington State and delivered a 5000 L oak fermenter and a 2250L tank to Oregon in June 2009.  There are several cooperages in Europe who make these items, but to the best of our knowledge Okanagan Barrel Works is the only North American cooperage actively making these wine tanks.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Forward, of course!  We will not be content just to sit back in our little corner of the world.  While we are absolutely delighted and grateful for the support we enjoy from the BC wine market, we do want to move our barrels into other areas.  To this end we have engaged a sales entity to cover Ontario and have made some market penetration there.  The Yakima Valley in Washington State is only 4 hours away and again we have some barrels entering that market.  If coopers in California can make and ship barrels competitively into BC, we can do the same thing in reverse. 

Most of the big French cooperages also have California-based production facilities to take advantage of lower production costs and freight savings by making French oak barrels for North America in North America.  We have had some very interesting conversations with several European coopers looking to create those same advantages for themselves.  Who really knows what the future holds?  Stay tuned.