Syrah - Day 100

This is the long slow period in our wine's production where not there is not much for the winemaker to do. In theory I'm supposed to monitor the wine every once in awhile with a tasting, but it's been since the last racking since I've tried any. The reality is we're not going to make any changes until after the next racking, since that's when we plan on oaking the wine and making any other adjustments to the flavor.

The reasoning here is the longer we wait to make the adjustments in flavor, the closer what we'll be working with will be to the taste of the finished wine. This reduces the guess work by making what we are tasting as close to the finished taste as possible. The drawback to this approach is that we'll have less time to make adjustments if our flavor needs a lot of work. Based on the tastings I've had so far, I don't believe this extra time will be necessary, but I'm just an inexperienced amateur, so that's far from certain to be the case.

That said, it's getting close to the time to do the next big step with the wine, we're coming up on the second racking. This will be pretty close to what we experienced with the first racking, but hopefully there will be less lees. This will also lead to less wine lost, since less leesl will be left on the bottom of each carboy during the racking process and with less lees, there will be less wine abandoned in the carboy.

So who's got some time to do the second racking in the next few weeks?