LAYOUT, DESIGN, AND DIMENSIONS
OF CASKS
The Cellar occupies the ground floor of a double-storied
structure, the upper level of which contains the Larder and
other necessary supplies (Infra cellarium. Supra lardariū &
aliorū necessarioriu repositio). The Cellar is equipped with
two rows of barrels set on rails: five large ones (maiores
tunnae) and nine smaller ones (minores). The small barrels
are 10 feet long and have a maximum diameter of 5 feet.
Their staves, convex for most of the length of the barrel,
take a turn toward the concave as they reach the end of the
cask. The large barrels are 15 feet long and have a central
diameter of 10 feet. Their staves are convex for the entire
length of the vessel. The scribe does not distinguish which
size barrel was used for wine and which for beer. (My
colleague, Prof. M. A. Amerine, assures me that there is no
technical reason why the same barrel might not be used
successively for the storage of wine and of beer, except that
red wine deposits pigment in the wood of the cask which, if
the cask is then used for beer or white wine, tends to discolor
these liquids.) It is likely that the practice was followed
of decanting the contents of large wine casks into
smaller ones, as volume was reduced through evaporation
and consumption, in order to prevent the wine spoiling
from contact with air.
During the aging of wine, as modern enologists point
out,[213]
there is a constant loss of liquid (called "ullage")
through the wood of the cask in which the wine is stored, a
loss which will cause acetification of the wine if it is not
made up. To prevent this occurrence, accepted modern
practice requires that large containers of wine be refilled
periodically (a process in California wineries called "topping")
with the same kind of wine, and preferably of the
same vintage, a supply of which is stored in smaller casks
and demijohns. The Monks' Cellar on the Plan of St. Gall,
with its different sizes of barrels, would be perfectly
equipped to handle this problem and the layout may indeed
suggest that both operations, the topping of larger from
smaller casks, as well as the decanting of larger barrels into
several smaller ones, were practiced in the monastic wineries
of the ninth century.
Another reason for having a larger number of small barrels,
in addition to the big ones is that this made it possible
to store smaller quantities of wine, obtained from different
vinyards, in separate containers and thus to retain their
specific character.
