Raw material

Adèle and Elsa Matrot have been at the helm of their eponymous estate for about ten years. Nestled in the heart of Meursault, the estate was passed down from their parents—a true family story that lives on through the way they craft their wines. It is Adèle and Elsa who now hold the delicate responsibility […]

In the production of stave wood, every step is essential to ensuring high-quality wood for cooperage. After the edging process, comes the sorting phase. This crucial step involves selecting the stave wood pieces that meet the strict requirements for producing staves, ensuring the quality and, most importantly, the watertightness of the barrels.   S [...]

Cubing logs* is the first step in the stave mill process. This is where future barrels are shaped.   Logs are trucked directly from the forest to the Group’s staveyards. In Murlin, in Varzy (Nièvre Merrain), in Saint-Martin-du-Puy (Ateliers du chêne) or at Tonnelleries Merranderies Réunies in Charente… One by one, the logging truck places […]

Loire Ornements and its teams made a brief stop in Nièvre. Located in Maine-et-Loire, specifically in Le Coudray-Macouard, the company was founded in 2017 by Charlotte Duplessis and Luc Debourg. It specializes in architectural roof ornaments and roofing, working across France, particularly on classified historical monuments.   They arrived in a gro [...]

Time is something you can’t control. You have to deal with it. For cooperage, it’s the same thing. There are crucial steps to follow. A virtuous cycle to select the best stave oaks to supply cooperages.   The oaks harvested from forests are at least 150 to 180 years old. The oaks purchased by wood […]

Oaks may be sold either standing, roadside or cut to size.   Standing timber: lTrees offered for sale are marked or selected by the seller (ONF, forestry expert…), in the forest, to form a batch. Once the deed of sale has been signed, the buyer becomes the owner and is responsible for harvesting, felling and […]

Optimizing oak raw material is at the heart of the Charlois group’s commitments, which recycles 100% of its wood raw material, of which nearly 90% in-house.   As Jean-Louis Binder’s photographies from the 1960s and the Maison Charlois archives testify, this policy of recycling production by-products (coquerons, short off-cuts, shavings, sawdust, sw [...]

As mentioned in previous instalments of the series devoted to photographs taken by Jean-Louis Binder in Murlin in the 1950s and 1960s, Maison Charlois used to produce both split timber and sawn timber, including a large number of railway sleepers.   The market for railway sleepers was massive back then. To understand the size of […]

The Charlois family has always enjoyed a close relationship with the Bertranges forest and its century-old oak trees. It was therefore only natural for the Charlois family to have sourced, for several centuries, high-quality oak staves from this exceptional forest that is now managed by the ONF (National Forest Office). These photographs taken by J [...]

After production, merrain staves are stacked in 0.5 m3 open-sided pallets to promote air circulation during the maturation process in the open air. Charlois Group stave producers also utilize a second stacking method known as “chimney stacking” (approximately 0.25 m3). This method, which ensures better air circulation and more uniform aging, is res [...]

« Ensuring that the forester renews the forest is the primary criterion for sustainable management in public forests. »   Particularly attentive to respecting forest environments, enhancing their value, and ensuring the sustainability of their management, we meticulously monitor the origin of our oak supplies. We strictly select our suppliers and s [...]

“To ensure that the forester renews the forest is the main criterion in the public forests”   Particularly attentive to the forest environments respect and to the sustainability of their management, we are ensuring the origin of our oak supplies, by carefully choosing our providers and by systematically favouring PEFC certification. ONF (Office nat [...]