2009 Syrah - Day 63 - Racking

Having a little extra labor around as a result of the holidays, it seemed like an excellent chance to rack the Syrah. I was hoping to take advantage of the cold late-December temperatures to drop the tartaric acid crystals from solution in the wine. Unfortunately rushing out of my parent's house on Christmas Day, I forgot to grab my siphon and carboy and as a result was a few key pieces of equipment short of what we needed for an efficient and effective racking. So as soon as the brew store in Sacramento opened the day after Christmas I was there with Spencer and Matt to get what we needed. This delay let it warm up into the the 50s, so the temperature was probably too warm to pull the tartaric crystals out. Guess we'll need to be a little more on point next time we rack the wine.

With a new carboy and small diameter siphon in hand we set to racking the wine. As this was our first endeavor that we didn't have an easy siphon, we struggled to find a sanitary way to get siphon started without the ease of a one-way valve.

Basically it was amateur hour of us trying different ways to get enough liquid in the tube to get the siphon started. We tried everything from using a straw to get it started to crinking the hose and pumping. All to no avail. The siphon refused to get started well enough for gravity to take over. Finally we went back to the book we'd been referencing and reread the racking section.

We basically settled on you can't start the siphon without some amount of cross contamination (if you're lacking a one-way valve). The book recommended using your mouth to start the siphon and then treating the transferred wine with a dose of sulfites to kill any contaminants. I wasn't particularly happy with this solution, but nothing better was presenting itself so we went for it.

After we got the siphon going it was just a matter of waiting for the smaller diameter tube to drain each of the carboys. It took awhile for the 38 gallons to pass through the small diameter tube of the siphon. That worked out OK, since we only had one extra carboy and it gave us enough a gap between steps to clean the lees out of the most recently emptied carboy, sanitize it and then measure and dilute the sulfites before we needed to start filling the new carboy without losing our siphon.

Another thing we made a conscious effort to do was to aerate the wine. Racking it the one time it is a good thing to have the wine exposed to air. A little bit of oxygen helps to kick into gear that last remaining yeast so they can burn through the remnants of sugar that might have made it through the secondary fermentation. It also gives the malolactic bacteria a little bit of a nudge, since the wine is oxygen poor after all the biological activity that's been taking place in it. After this racking, one of the main goals of the vintner is to protect the wine from exposure to air and light. These can damage the wine. One way to minimize exposure to air it to make sure the wine is filled all the way to the neck of the carboys. This gives the surface of the wine a minimal exposure to the air and thus minimizes the oxidation of the wine.

We also tried to minimize our wine lost during each racking by tipping the carboys on their side as the siphon was drawing near the bottom. This does stir up a little bit of the lees, but it also allows the siphon to capture a little more of the wine that would otherwise be left on the lees and dumped out on the lawn. It doesn't disturb the lees too much as it tends to be a heavier sludge than the wine we were trying to siphon.

Most sources say you expect to lose about 10% of your volume during the first racking. This may seem like a lot, but it's the price you pay for clean and clear wine. This batch ended up only losing about 2.5 gallons (out of 38 siphoned), a little less than the amount expected. I'd like to chalk that up to careful siphoning, but we may have also pulled a little bit more yeast than is ideal into the next round of aging the wine. Only time will tell.

The wine tasted good. The malolactic fermentation was further along than the Cabernet. This was a surprise since the Syrah was stored in a much colder environment than the Cab (my garage for the Syrah, Luke's closet for the Cab). The colder temperature is supposed to inhibit the bacteria's progress and growth. Unfortunately the dose of sulfides likely arrested the malolactic fermentation by killing all the bacteria that we inoculated the wine with. That will need to be something we need to pay attention to the next time we rack the wine. The secondary fermentation tasted like it was close to done, if not completely finished. We didn't put a sample through the hydrometer, but I will probably try to do it next weekend so that we can have a few hard numbers to work with, same probably should be true for an acid titration. It's been since primary fermentation that we've looked at those numbers and an update on the progress would give us a look into the progress the wine has made. There was a little carbonation in the wine too, though not as much as in the Cabernet. Other than that the wine tasted good, but it definitely needs a bit more time for the flavors to develop and to clarify further. I'm thinking the next racking should be two or three months down the line, but we will see.

Cabernet Sauvignon - Day 68-ish - First Racking

Last night we finally got around to doing our first racking on the small batch of Cabernet Sauvignon that Mr. Sauer was kind enough to get started while I was out of the country in late September and early October. After a few weeks in his garage and a few more weeks in his hall closet it was time to get the wine off the yeast and other sediments that didn't get pressed out two months ago (has it really been that long?).

The first step in racking (after the obligatory sanitizing of every instrument and surface that will contact the wine) is to siphon the wine from the container its been in to the container where it will do the next leg of its journey. For us, this was from one 6.5 gallon carboy to another 6.5 gallon carboy. Nothing too revolutionary here. We used my easy siphon that employs a one-way valve and two different diameter tubes to get a siphon going without too much effort. This beats risking of contamination by sucking on the line at the bottom of the siphon until gravity takes over.

Once the siphon gets going there really isn't much to do other than keep the siphon's intake away from the yeast and other sediments that have settled to the bottom of the carboy. This mostly leads to sitting around holding the siphon's neck. Good excuse to work on the bottle of wine we opened with dinner, try and come up with New Years plans and catch up on our idle chatter.

Once the wine starts getting down towards the bottom of the carboy a little more attention is required. The goal is to leave as little of the wine as possible on the lees, but also to transfer as little of the lees into the new carboy as possible. This is where a little more focus on the part of the racker is required. The racker needs to keep the siphon intake out of the yeast and sediment at the bottom of the wine's old container (the "lees" of the wine), but also keep the siphon intake in the liquid since if it starts slurping air, the siphon's integrity can be broken and the air bubbles could bring it all to a halt. Not stopping the siphon is especially important, since when you near the end there often isn't enough liquid to restart the siphon without sucking up a significant amount of sludge that's settled to the bottom of the carboy.

This tension between quality and quantity of the finished wine is a delicate balance. Almost any vintner is reluctant to see wine abandoned and wasted by being left behind on the lees, but careful attention needs to be paid to not carrying over too much of the yeast and the flavors the lees will impart if it remains on the wine too long. A little tip of the carboy we're siphoning out of won't disturb too much of the settled yeast, but will allow us to capture more of the wine that is near the bottom of the carboy. Though it's really a judgment call how close a vintner wants to "scrape the bottom of the barrel" to keep from wasting wine.

After the siphon transferred as much of the wine as we were able, we were left with a little bit of waste product and more room in the fresh carboy than is ideal. Since we want to minimize the surface area of the wine exposed to air as a means to minimize oxidation we needed to fill the carboy to the neck. There are a few different means of accomplishing this when there is a gap after racking. One is to fill the new carboy with some medium that will raise the volume of the liquid so the wine fills the carboy to the neck. This could be accomplished with glass marbles or possibly oak chips/balls/staves. Oak products should be closely monitored, since they will affect the finished flavor of the wine and can result in an over-oaked flavor if the wine isn't taken off the oak when it reaches the desired flavor. As we had neither oak chip nor marbles handy we opted for increasing the volume of the wine with some off the shelf Cab from the liquor store across the street from Luke's house. Not ideal, but with the limited options at 10:30 last night, it was our best solution.

We no longer can call our wine exclusively Napa Valley (we ended up adding 750 ml's of an Australian Cab and a California Cab), but we did eliminate this air gap, so that it will be ready to undergo the next leg of the racking process with risking oxidation of the wine.

Finally we did manage to taste a bit of the wine. The malolactic fermentation had mellowed some of the acid taste in the wine, but there was still a long way to go. The malolactic fermentation is something we'll need to closely monitor during the next racking or two to ensure that it finishes its work on the wine. The secondary fermentation had also left some residual carbon dioxide in the wine. You could definitely taste/feel the pinprick of bubbles in the wine. This mild carbonation should slowly dissipate. The goal is to have it all gone before we bottle. This carbon dioxide isn't all bad. As the wine slowly off-gases the carbon dioxide, it maintains a blanket of the gas over the surface of the wine. This layer of gas acts as a natural protection for the wine preventing wild microorganisms from colonizing the wine. When we no longer taste or feel the CO2 bubbles it will probably be necessary for us to protect our wine with another small dose of sulfites to keep it from getting contaminated. Overall, so far so good and our wine is well on its way to being a bottle-able finished product.

Sources of Knowledge

I'd like to imagine that the viticulture and enology coursework I did as an undergrad was a valuable part of my present knowledge base in wine making. Alas, most of the wine classes I took at UC Davis were very wide brushstrokes and left me with little practical knowledge or experience. Some of the upper level courses may have alleviated this distance, but my inability to pass organic chemistry prevented me from proving or disproving this hypothesis.

Instead my current wine making knowledge comes from more readily accessible sources. Specifically a book uncovered by Luke has been the source of most of my knowledge and my go-to reference for this wine making endeavor. The Way to Make Wine: How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home by Sheridan Warrick has been an invaluable resource to helping us get through our first two batches of wine. It's straightforward approach to wine making goes a long way towards pulling away the veil of mystery that shrouded the art. The chapters are well organized and warn you of the various perils and issues you will run into along the way. The book is thankfully equipped with a good index, which is a vital tool when you might read through a process and then need to relearn how to do a specific step months later. The book is also thankfully written with beginners in mind and definitions are included and explained. I can't recommend the book enough as a resource for the first time vintner or someone who has a little more to learn about wine making.

Syrah - Day 47 - Finished Cutting the Template

After a lot of trimming and shaving down all the burs, repair tape and fragile letters I've finished cutting out the template for our "labels." Nothing too dramatic. Now we just need a can of spray paint to test out the label and see if it's going to do the job and if the scotch taped sections are going to hold. I'm also considering doing a second stencil that would go behind the first one and add another level of complexity to the operation/design. Any ideas on what the stencil could depict?

Or should we stick with the less labor intensive approach? I'm always a fan of not having to paint our 200 bottles twice.

How to move a precious 6.5 Gal of Wine?

Looks like I will be moving at the end of the month which leaves me with an important question...how do you move a fragile and very full 6.5 gal carboy containing your precious Cabernet? It took all of my concentration and strength to bring the damn thing from the garage to my closet upsatirs...a cross-town move might prove interesting.

Syrah - Day 38 - Label Stencil Cutting

Made a little progress on the stencil for our wine bottle labels this week. Went shopping for some stencil supplies. Couldn't find the plastic that's recommended for screen print stencils, so went with some quilt pattern making supplies (mostly because it's the only flexible plastic I could find). Not ideal, the material is a little thicker than it needs to be and is designed to be cut with scissors, not a knife blade. This has complicated the cutting out of the stencil, since more force is required to punch through the plastic with the razor blade. The markings on the plastic help make it easy to line everything up and will make using the stencil easier since ensuring the stencil is straight on the bottle is as easy as lining up the marks on the back side.

My first attempt to print the stencil design directly onto the plastic sheet didn't dry-out and ended up being a smeary mess that needed to be wiped off. After that failure I opted to print out an image of the stencil and tape the plastic for the stencil over the image and cut through the plastic onto the image. The going's been slow, but I'm working on being careful and trying to get all the little plastic shards and shavings that the exactoblade leaves behind. I did have one part of the stencil that broke during cutting. I patched it up with scotch tape and am optimistic that will holdup. We'll see if that's true after I finish the stencil and do a couple test paints.

The stencil still isn't finished yet. Though one good tip I picked up was to start in the intricate cuts in the middle, since as you work your way out the stencil becomes more delicate as the supporting pieces are cut away. Starting in those spots allows you to manhandle the delicate parts a little more without fear they will come apart. Still a little ways to go. Hopefully I'll finish it up Monday or Tuesday next week. Then comes the opportunity to play with spray paint.

I still have 4 more sheets so if this one doesn't work out, I can do a few more attempts before I need to head back to the store. I'm also interested in maybe making a few different designs, either ones that can be overlaid/underlain with the one I am currently making or that can be used one their own to give us a few more label options.