THE BARRELS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
An invention of the Celts
Recent research has shown that the practice of storing and
moving wine in wooden casks made its appearance in
Europe in the first century B.C. in the territory of the Celts
and of the Illyrians. Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23/24-79) states
that "in the neighborhood of the Alps people put [wine]
into wooden casks and closed these round with hoops."[214]
Edward Hyams in an intriguing, but poorly annotated,
book ascribes this invention to the Allobroges, a Celtic
tribe that lived in and around the valley of one of the
principal alpine tributaries of the Rhone river, the Isère
(modern Dauphinois) where wine was first grown north of
Italy.[215]
Strabo (64/63 B.C.-A.D. 21 at least) informs us that
wooden casks "larger than houses" (πίθοι ξύλινοι μείζους
οἴκων) were used to store wine in Cisalpine Gaul,
[216]
and
that the Illyrians brought their wine from Aquileia to
various markets in wooden casks in exchange for slaves,
cattle and hides.
[217]
Egyptian & Greco-Roman methods of storing wine
The Romans, who like the Greeks and Egyptians, stored
and carried their wine in earthenware amphorae (fig. 227)
were startled by this ingenious innovation. Hyams believes
that this invention of storing wine in huge containers
formed by a multitude of separate pieces was dependent on
the more temperate climate prevalent in the lower Alps,
where barrels could more easily be kept in good condition
than in the hot and dry climate of the mediterranean
countries.[218]
Unlike the more breakable and considerably
smaller amphora used in the classical world (as an official
capacity measure the amphora was the equivalent of 25.5
liters) the wooden barrel was capable of storing wine in
larger quantities, and at considerably lower cost. Its primary
contribution to western life, however, appears to have lain
not so much in this as in the fact that it enabled man to
develop superior vintages by offering more favorable conditions
for the aging of wines. Edward Hyams purports this
fact to constitute the great difference between the wines of
antiquity (made from sweet grapes and stored in heavily
pitched containers offering poor conditions for maturing)
and the wine of modern times (made from smaller and
more acid grapes and susceptible to oxygenization under
the influence of air filtering through the pores of the
wood).[219]
From a reading of Hyam's interesting study one may
gather the impression that the ancients drank only young
wines. This is clearly not the case, as a perusal of Billiard's
exemplary and carefully documented study on wine and
vines in the ancient world will show. Pliny (Hist. Nat.,
XXIII, 22, 3) makes it a point to emphasize that a good
wine should neither be too young nor too old. Galen (De
antidotis, I, 3) and Athenaeus (Deipn., I, 26, b) write that
the wine of Alba reaches its maturity after fifteen years;
the wines of Tibur, Pompeii and Labicum after ten years.
Greek wines are said to decline after six or seven years
(Pliny, Hist. Nat., XIV, 10, 2; Athenaeus, Deipn., I, 26, b).
The wine of Falerno, bitter when young, became drinkable
after ten years, and after fifteen or twenty years acquired
the exquisite refinement that made it an incomparable
liqueur (Pliny, Hist. Nat., XXIII, 20, 2). It could attain
thirty or forty years (Petronius, Trim., XXXIV), but
having reached that age, it began to turn (Cicero, Brutus,
83).[220]
If there was a difference, then, it could not have
been in the possession or want of knowledge about the
virtues of aging but in the more favorable conditions
offered for this process by the new material used for the
containers in which wine was matured.
The ancients when faced with the problem of storing
wine in bulk, did so by putting it into large earthenware
vessels (dolia, Old Latin: calpares) which were covered by
a convex lid (operculum) sealed to the body of the vessel by
a heavy layer of pitch. These vessels were buried to the
rim in a deep layer of sand (fig. 228). Some of the larger
dolia were so high that a fully grown man could stand erect
inside without being visible. The specimen shown (fig. 227)
has a height of 6 feet 3 inches (1.90 m.), a circumference of
14 feet 8 inches (4.45 m.) and a storage capacity of 211 U.S.
gallons (800 liters). There is no need to emphasize that
these large earthenware containers must have been frightfully
expensive, since their manufacture was dependent on
firing ovens of unusual dimensions; and that to transport
them, even over small distances, posed delicate problems,
both in view of their weight and their susceptibility to
breakage. It is also quite obvious that there was a non-transgressible
upper limit for the size of an earthenware
container that had to be fired in a single piece.
The barrel: constructional & viticultural advantages
The barrel was free of any such limitations. Being composed
of a multitude of long and narrow staves (laminae,
tabulae) forced into position by iron hoops (circuli) its
volume could be extended to previously unfeasible proportions,
as witnessed by the casks, "as large as houses"
which Strabo saw in Cisalpine Gaul, or the monster cask
in the Castle of Heidelberg, which has a storage capacity
of 49,000 gallons: 232 times the volume of the large
dolium of the Maison Carrée in Nîmes (fig. 227). The
transport of such large containers posed no problem whatsoever,
since they were assembled on the spot. Smaller
barrels, as a glance at fig. 230 shows, could even be rolled
on the ground. Being set up above the ground the content
of these containers was more easily tapped than that of the
buried dolia; it did not require that the container itself be
opened, another advantage to the process of aging.
The oldest extant barrel and the earliest
visual representations
The oldest extant wooden barrel, to the best of my
knowledge, is a cask that was lifted from a pond outside the
city of Mainz in Germany, together with numerous other
Roman objects (fig. 229.B). It was filled with fillets of fish.
An oak barrel virtually contemporaneous with those
shown on the Plan of St. Gall, and of the same elongated
shape as the
tunnae minores was found in the maritime
trading settlement of Haithabu where, standing upright,
it formed the walls of a well (fig. 229.A). To use barrels for
that purpose appears to have been a common practice of
medieval well construction.
[221]
The earliest visual representations of wine barrels are
found on the column of Trajan (A.D. 113) where Roman
soldiers are shown loading wine barrels onto a Danube
boat at a fort in Northern Yugoslavia (fig. 231), and in a
number of Gallo-Roman stone reliefs showing barrels as
they are being moved on boats or carted on wagons (fig. 232
and 233). The shape and dimension of one of these,
recorded on a Roman stone relief now in the Musé Saint-Didier
at Langres (fig. 233), appears to be identical with
that of the smaller barrels on the Plan of St. Gall. The
barrel depicted fills the entire length of a four-wheeled
wagon, and to judge by the size of the mules by which
the cart is drawn and the height of the body of its driver,
it must have had a length of roughly seven feet. It has the
same concave curvature of the staves at the two ends of
the vessel. This form may have been standard throughout
the entire first millennium A.D., for it appears again in the
Bayeux Tapestry (fig. 234) in a scene that shows William's
army setting out to conquer England, and carrying on carts
a provision of wine and weapons. The inscription leaves
no doubt about the content of this precious container:
ET HIC TRAHUNT CARRUM CUM VINO ET
ARMIS.
"And here they pull a cart with wine and with arms."
