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.
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