Rack It!

Approximately 48 hours after pressing you need to rack the wine off the gross lees.  Lees are the bigger particles in the wine, thus gross lees are the bigger portion.  Fine lees are good, they give the wine some character and interact with the malolactic fermentation among other things.

But after pressing the gross lees start to drop out and you want to get rid of those as soon as possible via racking.  Racking is what you do when you 'rack' the wine from one container to another.  We are making our wine with as minimal handling as possible.  In order to achieve this, the racking is done by gravity.  Basically I carry the wine upstairs, put it on the counter and siphon the wine out of the carboy on the counter to the carboy on the floor.  Voila, racked!

All carried upstairs, no spills...yet.

Action photo.

And here is the finished product:

We started with 31 gallons.  After racking we ended up with 28 gallons.  Five 5 gallon carboys and a 3 gallon.  In the past years we have had to open some wine to top off after racking.  Due to better planning, more varied sized carboys and experience we did not have to buy anything to top with.  Going forward we will assume that we are losing approximately 10% after racking and plan accordingly.

As I was racking the other thing I did to the wine is add the malolactic culture to start the secondary fermentation.

Also an update on the rose.  It is still alive and fermenting slowly.  Remember this was not in the heated closet and in fact is being fermented entirely in carboys.  We had 6 gallons of rose in a 5 and 1 gallon carboy.  I racked that during ferementation and got 5 gallons plus two bottles that I hand corked.  The color of the rose is incredible, here is a picture I took as I was racking:

Rose, during racking.

As luck would have it one of those bottles blew the cork and 65% of the wine all over the living room about a week after I bottled it.  Scared the heck out of Paty and Porfy who were in the room at the time.  Needless to say, the extra bottle that did not blow up is now in the garage.

All for now, I had this post done quite some time ago but since we rack only two days after the pressing I did not want to spam posts on the ever popular Tobinblog.

As usual, if you just want the winemaking posts click on the winemaking label and they will all come up.

Last year's Syrah has already made it to the Husky Tailgate and Kirkland Kissinger's to rave reviews.  If you see me over the holidays there is a good chance that the wine will not be far behind.