Hand Built Wine Racks

    Brendan, our Winery Manager, has always felt that our hand made wine display racks worked wonders in the local stores through which we distribute our Four Quarters Wine. And I have to say that it makes me smile every time I walk into a store and see one of our little hand built beauties.

Yes, they are wine racks, but they are more. And represent much in the way of our values and how we put our values forward, into the real.

Roger at final assembly
of a batch of wine racks

     The Four Quarters Winery is our effort at localized hand made production, using local resources and marketed locally. An important part of the long term preparations and adaptations that this small community is making for the impending Age of Limits. And its not just how we make and market our wine, but goes right down to the wine racks themselves.

     We start with a trip to Craig McCusker's sawmill, where we pick out a stand of locally forested White Pine. If we are lucky it has been seasoning out in the elements for some time, perhaps even a year. This natural ageing brings out the warm character of the Pine, and makes for much easier working in the shop.

     Next we run the rough-cut lumber through "Mr Logosol," our Swedish dual spindle molder-planer. We are proud of this machine and its' $8,000 purchase was a daunting decision. But it has made so much possible for us, from cutting our own interior moldings, to most notably making possible the very radical (and beautiful) building techniques that we use in camp with our buildings.

     Then Roger, and any other help we can press gang into volunteering, set to work manufacturing full sets of individual parts from the shop prints that we create on our CAD system. In this case a run of 12 racks, 22 parts per rack, for a total of 264 individual parts, machined plus or minus 1/32 of an inch. I sure hope my prints are correct. "Yeah" says Roger with resignation in his eye.

     Three days of dust, wood chips and a reasonably small pile of miscut parts later, the full set of parts are complete and we can begin the process of assembly and finishing.

     They are pretty, ar'nt they, standing all in a row. Ready to be filled with Cottage Crafted Wine and sent out into the world as a message in the beauties of powering down. Hand Made with Craft, local materials supporting a local product. Prelude for An Age of Limits.

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