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Wood you like to stave off junk catalog mail?

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Hello everybody and today is February 17th. Okay, I know, you already knew that.

But what you may not have known is that today Aaron Ward was born in 1844.  As a poor kid, he was apprenticed at age 14 in a Michigan factory where he cut pieces of wood to be used for the sides of barrels.

That brings us to our Wine Word of the Day: Stave

A stave is one of the thin, narrow-shaped pieces of wood that form the sides of a wine barrel.

Unless, of course, you’re into music then a stave is the music staff on sheet music.  Or it’s a staff like a stick or a rod, or the rung of a ladder, or when something is crushed inward…  Yeah, I know I’m getting off topic here, but I want to ensure that you were getting your word’s worth.

Okay, back to barrels.  Staves are made from white oak.  French staves have to be hand cut, whereas American oak can be machine cut.  They say it has something to do with the grain, but I think it’s just another case of American efficiency versus those meticulous French traditions.

Staves have to be heated to be bent into place to form the rounded sides of the barrel.  This heating is usually done over a fire made from the sawdust and the cuttings of the staves.  The longer the staves are heated, the more toasted they get.  The more toasted the inside of the barrel is, the more oak or smoke flavor that will be infused into wine.  Thus, the more wine you drink from these barrels, the more toasted you will get.

Anyway, poor little Aaron was only making 25-cents a day cutting wood for barrels.  But he was a hard-working and ambitious kid.   As a young man, he worked in small retail shops, but then had a big idea to sell products directly to consumers in the rural parts of America.

Just as he was launching this new, big enterprise, his first stock of products burned up in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, before he could sell them.  Although everyone thought his business idea was crazy anyway, Aaron Montgomery Ward, persevered and rebuilt his stock and finally distributed the world’s first general merchandise mail-order catalog.

It would be 15-years before some Dick named Richard Warren Sears, would mail his first catalog… though I’m not really sure if he went by “Dick” or “Richard” but I did buy a refrigerator from him last month to keep my wine cold.

Useful links to stop junk mail:

http://www.41pounds.org/
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/18530707/ns/today-money/
http://environment.about.com/od/greenlivingdesign/a/junkmail.htm

Grape Stomper Todd suggests the following items:

	LEGO Architecture Sears Tower (21000)		Catalog: The Illustrated History of Mail Order Shopping
	Creating a Profitable Catalog: Everything You Need to Know to Create a Catalog That Sells		Wine Barrel Stave Candle Holder

Tagged as: barrel, oak, stave

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