Where AMÉDÉE Comes From: A Family, A Workshop, A Choice
The name of the company is a first name, my great-grandfather's. The rest of the story is less tidy than a brochure would like, and that is just fine.
Why this name?
AMÉDÉE was my great-grandfather's first name. When I was young, it was my grandfather Robert who taught me cooperage. I will not pretend I was a good apprentice. I was distracted, often clumsy, and he would lose patience: "My father Amédée would never have put up with that!"
When the time came to name what I was building, that first name came to me without my really having to choose. It is a tribute to my great-grandfather and to my grandfather Robert, and to men who understood wood the way others understand music, without needing to explain it.
Why stop making barrels?
I grew up making barrels and I still love them. A freshly assembled barrel, the curve of the staves, the fire inside during toasting: it still does something to me. It is beautiful craftsmanship, and I have no desire to speak badly of it.
I stopped anyway, and it was not easy. What decided me was the amount of forest a barrel takes, the share of the wood left behind at splitting, and the weight of an object you then ship to the other side of the world. I need to be clear on one point: this is a conviction, not a demonstration. I have no comparative figures to put in front of you, and I am not going to invent any to make my choice more comfortable. I decided with what I saw in the workshop.
What I believe is that you can bring wine a good part of what oak knows how to do without going through the barrel. Not everything. A barrel is also a vessel, gas exchange, microbial life, and a chip does not replace that. I do not see the alternatives as a compromise, but I do not sell them as an equivalent either.
What is left of the cooper's trade?
The wood, and the way it is handled. We select the stave wood, we let it air dry for 36 months before toasting, and we toast it with the same care a cooper gives a barrel. These are the gestures my grandfather demanded, applied to different formats: fine chips, staves of 7 and 18 mm, barrel inserts in 22 mm sticks.
Does that set us apart? I honestly do not know. Others do good work too. What I can say is that we did not start with a marketing spec sheet, we started with a workshop.
How does this knowledge get passed on?
Slowly, and rather imperfectly. There are people on the team who have spent their careers on oak, who recognize a lot by touch and by smell, and who get it wrong too. That is the trade: you learn by making mistakes in front of someone who points them out.
What we measure in the lab, we know how to measure. What happens in a 300 hL tank on an October morning still partly escapes us, and we keep looking. That is also why we built our calculation tools: they gather what we have measured, they do not claim to know in your place.
What this changes for you
Not much on paper, and maybe something on the phone. When you call us, you reach people who have made barrels and who know what you are talking about when you describe a four-wine barrel. Our products are in the wood shop, our answers to common questions in our questions and answers. And if one of our numbers does not add up in your cellar, write to us: we would rather correct it than defend it.
Read next : The Merrain Forest: Where Every Oak Journey Begins · Radoux-Ferrière Wine: a friendship, some oak, and a Double Gold