Wine Barrel Creations

My name is Lou Kruger and I'm a member of the Gallery of the Art in the wonderful downtown Newcastle. They come from various regions, an inaugural region, various wineries. They're very difficult to get. The wineries keep them only for five to six years maxim My name is Lou Kruger and this is my storage facility for the barrels that are acquiring from the Niagara region, primarily in the Niagara on the lake. And this is an ideal storage because it is fairly high in h So the reason I have the ladder here, the little ramp is to be able to roll the barrels under the second tier and then I fill them with about four or five gallons of water to make sure that the staves are kept tight together. Because if they dry out for some reason and they come up later when the hoops are being taken off, they will not fit back together if they're dried out. The waste of time. You just hold it onto the back of the horse drawn wagon. That's how old this thing is. You can see the run, how they vent this way so that it fits the barrel. After they'ready I'm taking that over to my other studio where I'm taking that apart and work on it. After the storage facility, then I'll take it to the back of the premises here and take the hoops off and power wash the inside of the barrel and scrape all the sugar off and power washing in, power washing in until then they dry it out. When there's a specific time, there's a very little time, a window available, they leave it too long, they twist on you. I have a window of approximately maxim If that doesn't work then it's turning into a firewood. As you can see up in here, this is all air dried. It has to be a very slow procedure. You cannot force dry it because the interior of the barrel will just blister. A lot of this stuff here that you see down here, this end here, this is all at least a year of air dried. Clamp down so to assure the straightness of the rectangular boards, the flat boards or the heads of the barrel. Then they get fine tuned, cut to various sizes and width. I'll show you some of the handles that are being made. It's just one of the many. And then there are some handles being produced by a fellow artist from the gift of art. Al Easton is my metal specialist. He's doing fabricating nose handles. I have a variety of several other artists that I'm working with on the gallery. As an example, we get a board These pieces are done by another artist, Debbie Dell, who's doing all the glasswork forming, which will be eventually then eliminated to the metal. Another artist from the gallery I'm working with, Rosemary Jenkins, who is doing the pottery work for me. If you don't So we're trying to keep it all in the family as much as we can. Now this up there is my latest and the very latest year will be the first to see it. I call it a hole on the wall. There you go. And that's done by another artist, Al Easton. He's doing this contract here. These handles are removable. It's interchangeable from one side to the other. If you get tired of one look, then you change it. If you don'this one over here is just a quite finished yet. That one is made out of railroad spikes. There's another one coming here, but we have to wait till the artist is ready. I have been doing this for about eight years now and it's just a wonderful, wonderful experience. The wonderful people I meet on various shows and retail clients. It is a hobby which is not meant to make a living on it because you will not make a living on a hobby. Going back to how I started this, I'm actually an interior designer by profession and I branched out into the woodworking facilities at my own cabinet making shop for many years. It's a wonderful craftsman working for me, but I had to give it up because all the craftsmen were leaving this planet. Ten years ago, my wife wanted to. . . Went to a wine tasting too and then I heard we saw one of those big barrel heads on the Lazy Susan and my wife said, I want that. So I refused to pay the money that they asked for. So I said, I'll make your one. So eight years later, she still hasn't got one. That's typical and every time I come up with a new shape, design, that's an honey that's yours and then next thing That'so it is. And I definitely enjoy working with the n So I just hope that we can continue on as long as we can. Thank you.