Phenols are attributed to many things, as everyone else has pointed out. It could be the barrels were left for a long time empty and a wild yeast took hold during that time, but phenols are not indicative of barrel aging.
Basically phenols are driven from a wild yeast (except in the case of hefeweizen strains and some Belgian strains - though it is important to point out that these strains produce more "clove-like" character and are much more pleasing than the plastic-clove-like character driven by much of the wild yeast) or chlorine/chloramines that are present in the municipal water (or chlorine based sanitizers).