Wine Racking

It was wine racking time at the old homestead yesterday. For those who may not know what racking is then I'll explain. Racking is the process of draining the good wine off the top of the dead yeast cells (called lees). There is certain equipment needed to accomplish this.

First you need a syphon tube. Usually it's a rigid plastic rod attached to a coil of flexible plastic tubing. Creating a suction, you let the carboy of wine drain from one container to a cleaned and sterilized second container by gravity feed. When the first container is nearly drained you pull out the tube so that the "lees" aren't sucked into your clear wine.

Since you want to "top off" the new carboy to eliminate air space, you can add boiled sugar water, grape juice or wine to the container and then cap or seal the top with either a stopper or a air trap. An air trap by the way allows trapped air (usually CO2 from the fermentation) to escape but doesn't allow outside air to enter. It's important to cap this "bung hole" to keep your wine from becoming infected by stray yeast or bacteria which could spoil it before it's ready to drink.

All in all I racked ten gallons of wine (blackberry, blueberry, elderberry, pear and a mixed variety of all those. Funny think, I'm getting so good at siphoning that I didn't spill or taste any of the wine. I was hoping for a little taste to see how it was progressing. Oh well- maybe next time during the bottling process.