Rack It!

As you may or may not have noticed I am spacing these posts out a bit.  Mostly because winemaking involves two speeds.  Either really busy, or waiting.  There doesn't seem to be much in between.  And a great portion of the really busy is front loaded when I started blogging about wine.

So after the press the next step was to rack the wine.  This I did approximately 48 hours after the press.  Racking is not too hard, it involves carrying the wine upstairs from it's home in the basement and setting up a siphon to move the wine from one carboy to another.  After you press the must, you end up with wine.  But the wine is not filtered, so you have something called Gross Lees.  (Gross meaning big)  The Lees quickly settle to the bottom of the wine and you are racking the good wine off the top and leaving the gunk (or Lees) at the bottom to be dumped out.

I did this part by myself, because my partner was very distracted by a little person that night and you really want to rack between 24-48 hours after the press.

The little man made the blog.

Here is my racking set up:

After racking our 21 gallons of pressed wine became 20 gallons.  We used 4 bottles (pictured) in addition to the two half gallons to top off the four carboys.  That is a tricky part of being a home winemaker is that we are not working with massive quantities.  So we have to think ahead  in what we are producing in order to keep full carboys.  Keeping full carboys is crucial since air is your enemy when making wine.  Our current inventory of carboys is six 5 Gallon, one three gallon, one one gallon and numerous half gallon beer growlers that can double as small carboys in a pinch.

When we pressed, the Tempranillo was basically done fermenting but the Syrah was still at about 4% residual sugar and still aggressively fermenting.  We were worried the racking might slow or stop the fermentation, but that has not been the case as I write this a week later it is still bubbling along in the carboys.

In addition to racking, we started the Malolactic fermentation as well.  Malolactic fermentation is a process in which tart tasting malic acid, naturally present in the must, is converted to softer tasting lactic acid.  We again used the premade cultures, here is a photo of one used bag.  One bag per five gallons.

Much easier using these than the dried version, no stress that we messed up the culture.

Now, because it's wine there must be more powders to add.  Yes sir, two days after starting the Malolactic fermentation I added a some powder that looked more like clay called Opti'Malo Plus.  The Opti'Malo is supposed to make sure the Malolactic fermentation keeps going.

Lastly, as this turned out to be a longer post than I intended (I guess I had more material), we also tested the current wine we have in carboys.  We did a free SO2 test, assessing the amount of free SO2 in the wine.  To do that you have to set up this chemistry set and run the test.  The test itself takes 12 minutes.  Setting up takes around 4 hours the first time and 10 minutes once you get it all figured out.  Here is our basement bathroom/chemistry station:

Two beakers, an air pump, some wine and a lot of chemicals.

That's all for now, the test showed that we needed to add a full dosage of SO2.  At last test we needed to add about a 10% dose (probably equivalent to the margin of error).  So it did need the test and the treatment.  But this batch of wine should be ready for the bottle in December, just in time for the Holidays.