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.