Smart, not romantic: Barrel Rack Safety

Wines & Vines, Jan, 2000 by E.D. Rust

Barrel racks don't have the romantic cachet of barrels. Consumers who wax poetic about barrel-fermented, toasty oak flavors could probably care less about the benefits of powder coating or increased barrel density in the cellar.

But all of that, including the safety in the workplace that barrel racks help enhance, contributes to the cost of goods sold--and the winery's profit margin--on that bottle of Chardonnay.

When Dr. Richard Peterson designed and developed the first steel barrel rack back in the 1970s, his incentive was more altruistic than safety-related. "For me the barrel rack was simply a time and labor saving device," he said recently. "The safety features really only came out when we discovered how stable the racks could be made."

Historically, since barrel racks have only been in extensive use since the late 1970s, the biggest customers for racks have been medium to large-sized California wineries. A small French chateau, with few barrels, low cellar ceilings and a reliance on hand labor at every winemaking step, has little use for barrel racks. Making chock blocks and building barrel pyramids has been a tradition and an art for years... and it has worked in chateaux, whether in France or in California.

But as California wineries expanded during the '8Os, the need for safe and easy barrel storage combined with the desire to utilize space efficiently made racks a hot item, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake turned out to be a well-timed sales pitch. Now it makes sense for even small wineries to consider the safety features of racks.

Until steel racks came along, wineries used traditional pyramids and elaborate wooden shelving systems, mainly made of 4" x 4" lumber, for barrel storage. They were tough to clean and required extensive hand labor. Worst of all, OSHA rules made them prohibitively expensive to build and wasteful of winery space.

"When I got to Beaulieu," recalls Richard Peterson, "we had 4" x 4" racks with a tire at the end of each narrow aisle. Cellar workers rolled the barrels down the racks and off the end, where they fell onto a tire to stop the barrel and absorb the shock," which was not necessarily a CAL-OSHA approved maneuver, he said.

Peterson figured he could modify pallets to store barrels to easily move the barrels with a forklift. He visited Schenley to assess their system, and found barrels stored on their heads, fine for aging bourbon or brandy, but impractical for wine. The pallet idea stuck with him when he left Beaulieu to start the Monterey Vineyard. "I finally had the chance to design a system from scratch, rather than retrofitting," he recalls. "We ended up with two-barrel pallets that could be handled in stacks of two.

That was more stable than the original idea of using a four-barrel pallet," he said. "The four-barrel pallets were fairly stable and helped save space, but they were clumsy and extremely heavy; they required too large a forklift."

The welded steel rack idea came when he noticed a similar device used for holding Coca-Cola drums. He designed a similar rack for wine barrels, then gave away his idea to the wine industry.

"I know I could've made a fortune, but it was enough just to get my name on the Barrel Rack design. It was very important for me to give something back to the industry." So at the Wine Industry Technical Symposium (WITS) in 1975 Peterson presented his rack design in a paper to attendees. Few prototypes had been made at that point, but numerous manufacturers jumped at the opportunity.

One of those vendors was Western Square Industries, a versatile company on the lookout for new manufacturing opportunities. Western Square already manufactured steel racks for bottled water, farm equipment, picking bins and trailers. "We always felt that we were in the business of reducing labor costs, as well as just manufacturing," says company vice-president Trygve Mikkelsen. With bottled water racks, for example, that meant designing a system so that a five-gallon jug was untouched by human hands until the driver physically delivered it to the water cooler.

That philosophy fit nicely into barrel racks, says Mikkelsen, because Western Square could build racks and washing systems so that cellar workers would no longer have to physically pick up barrels. Fork lifts did all the work, from stacking to washing, saving time and lower back pain.

But even labor saving devices have a life span. "Steel gets weak," says Mikkelsen, "especially when it gets bumped and tossed around by a forklift. It also rusts after awhile. In areas with a salt air influence like Carneros, rust rates can increase dramatically. Western Square and other rack suppliers began retrieving racks from customers and refurbishing them, sandblasting off the rust and repainting the racks.

"They looked like new," says Mikkelsen, "and we thought the powder coating would increase the life span," but customers were still returning racks because of damage. Indeed, the reconditioned racks experienced damage rates at far higher levels than new racks, so in the interest of research, a Western Square manager destroyed one of the reconditioned racks to assess weak spots. The hack-saw test altered the course of Western Square's business.