First Racking

Today we racked all of our '07 batches for the first time. "Racking" is a fancy way of saying transferring wine from one vessel to another, filtering out gunk you don't want.

You'll see that as the contents of the carboys settle, there's a gross layer at the bottom, called lees (spent yeast, grape particles, etc.) The first two images show the difference in amount of lees - the first shot is of the "free run" from Don's vineyard. The second sho is pressed-out wine from our vineyard. In either case, you need to get this sentiment out of the wine, so you very carefully move the jug full of wine (eg careful not to stir that gunk up), then siphon off wine from *above* that level of lees. So that's what we did!

Some notes:
-> 1st Carboy: Filled with "2007 Leach", which appears to have completed malo-lactic fermentation (MLF) during primary fermentation. In an ideal world we would have racked earlier, but instead we kept stirring the lees into the wine and opted to rack all batches at once. This one only had about 25 ppm of sulfite in it, so we added another 1/8t potassium metabisulfate ("meta") to the 6 gallon carboy while racking, which is roughly another 25 ppm.

-> 2nd & 3rd Carboys: roughly 50% 2007 Leach and 50% 2007 Estate. We blended the two because we really wanted our estate to go through MLF, but it either had too much alcohol or too high sulfite levels. By blending the two, the hope was that the MLF culture still alive in the 2007 Leach would transfer over to the other wine. It did! After about 5-7 days from blending, along with being kept at 70 degree temperature and stirring the lees about twice a week, we heard the snap, crackle, pop of MLF converting that malic acid into lactic acid. No meta added this time.

-> 4th carboy: 2007 Estate only. Because of the alcohol, acidity, and sulfite level we're pretty sure there's no hope of this one going through MLF. But because it's super acidic we want to try to reduce acid anyway, so we racked & added Potassium Carbonate at just over 1/2 teaspoon / 3 grams per gallon. We diluted the potassium carbonate in water before adding, and now the goal is to get that carboy as cold as possible, so the potassium carbonate will slowly precipitate through the wine, bind with extra acids, and end up as crystals in the bottom that you remove in next racking.

Now we keep that 4th carboy very cold (leaving it outside, hanging re-freezable cold packs over its shoulder to try to keep it colder than the air). The rest will sit in the cellar and age away.