Looking back at racking histories

Year	Date pressed	Days in primary	Days to next racking	Days to next racking	Days to next racking
2016	10/1/2016	8
2015	9/19/2015	7	11	64
2014	10/5/2014	6	7	75	115
2013	9/22/2013	6	8	56
2012	9/29/2012	7	8	82	78

Holy mackerel.  

Turns out that I've had a language shift that's created a racking shift.  2012 through 2015 when we took the must out of the primary and into carboys it was active enough so that we left air-gaps and a couple days later, as things calmed, we topped them off.  In those years, 7 to 11 days after topping off, we racked the wine and I called that racking it off its gross lees.

2016, with a different varietal, when we went from primary to carboys we topped immediately, and I also dumped the bottom couple inches of must calling them (in my mind) the gross lees.  Whatever!  But it means that if we rack this weekend we'll be at 40 days where we'd previously been at a max of 11.  I'm fine with it - things are looking beautiful.

2014 Muscat, day 244, 10 gallons bottled

Good, bad or ugly we bottled 10 gallons of the Muscat this morning for the summer party.  We still need to make our decisions about the 2012 reds.

2014 Muscat day 231, popped stoppers

Oh, yeah, that's right, sometimes after racking I like to use bubblers rather than stoppers.  This time we just put the stoppers back in and two of them popped at different times since racking.  I don't know how long either was out before we noticed.  Sigh.

2014 Muscat day 230, 3rd rack & blend

Well, it seems that no matter what resolutions we make on crush day, we always bottle too late.

This morning we tasted the three cb's of Muscat.  Much better than a month or two ago when I thought we might toss it.  Color is fab - dandelion, that's a photo of it from this morning.  Initial pretty intense floral nose, but it dissipates in 15 minutes or so - too bad.  We found variations in the carboys and found that if we blended the wine and let it sit a little the acid wasn't as whack and the the mouthfeel was pretty nice.

So we decided to rack and blend everything, losing a couple or three liters in the process.  We backfilled with some of the wine we bottled very early from this same making.  (We went to backfill with one of the remaining 2010 bottles but found it metallic.)

We'll let it settle through the week and bottle for the June party.

2014 Muscat, day 102 Jan 14 2015

All three carboys have solid stoppers in them - these wouldn't hold in the first day or two after racking.  Gassing off from the disturbance?  Set now.  Very little schmutz settling out over the last 11 days.  No measurements made.  Cellar is cool with the continued cold weather outside.

2014 Muscat, day 91, Jan 3 2015, 2nd racking

1600:
Lori & I racked this afternoon.  Went from 5+5+5 to 5+5+3+ 7x750ml.

Very little waste with the lees, but rather than stretch to 3 full carboys and topping them up or using glass beads for the void, I really wanted to have a little wine bottled for reference & comparison to what we bottle next.  Won't be as clear but it's the taste and feel I want to compare.

I added about 1 ml 10% meta solution per gallon, hoping to raise the readings by maybe 10 ppm or more.  Didn't add anything to the wine we bottled.

I also re-tested the pH - it really the off-the-charts 4.06 I saw yesterday.  In theory, at this pH, we'd need a whacky, tasteable amount of sulphur added to the wine to protect it.  Ain't going there.

Our 2nd racking of the 2013 wine was at about day 75, so we're a little slower this year.  But I'm hoping we'll bottle a month or more earlier than we did last year.

2130:
No visible gassing off - will switch from bubblers to solid bungs tomorrow morning.

2014 Muscat, day 90, Jan 2 2015

Did a quick check on the Muscat yesterday morning, and getting ready to rack before heading back to work on the 5th.  The wine was about 57F and the cellar maybe a few degrees warmer.  Stopper on CB Charlie was less tight than it should have been and I reseated it.  No testing yet.

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Holy moly, testing is done and it's effin good!

10 gal muscat on the bench

pH around 4.06 on the meter.  Sulphur around 15 or 16 ppm by Titret.  Acid around .65% tartaric, or 4.2 ppt sulfuric.

about 1.5 ml of NaOH 

Color shift at 2.6 ml

color shift vs wine

The acid level is a great relief, given how flat the must seemed, and then how sharp the wine was immediately after primary fermentation.

Color is right on, light lemon yellow.  The nose struck me immediately - for the first time since we started I thought this is delicious!  Mouth-feel was a surprise - I'm sure it went through malolactic fermentation: we did nothing to force it or prevent it, but I guess my mouth wasn't quite expecting it.  

I'm breathing a sigh of relief.  This summer's party is on!

2014 Muscat, day 57, Nov 30 2014

Tested Betty and Charlie for acid: at or just under .75% tartaric, 4.8 ppt sulfuric.  Higher than my hopes, but at least not above the normal white range (though at the very tippy top of it).

2014 Muscat, day 54, Nov 27 2014, Thanksgiving

A week's past since our last look at the wine, and 12 days since the last post.  Clarity (almost) happens.  Definitely in range of a second racking - any time this weekend to about 2 weeks from now.  Will taste this weekend to see where the acid feels to be at.

2014 Muscat, day 42, Nov 15 2014

Between 65 and 66F in the cellar at 7 AM - only 33F outside, the coldest evening and morning so far of the fall.

Tasted the Muscat from CB Alice- much less aggressively tart, but still too acidic, much rounder than it was.  I'm thinking we did go through some malolactic conversion.  Color very good in the sample, yellow, though still not clear in the CB.

Did a quick Titrette test and was surprised to see it come back at 15 or 16 ppm.  Was expecting it to be considerably higher since the addition made on Nov 1.  Might check again soon but will take the sample from deeper in the CB.  This morning's sample was scootched off the very top of the neck with a 5 ml dropper.

2014 Muscat, day 38, Nov 11 2014

Continued lightening, still translucent, completely still to the eye.  Colors of Raisin and Muscat are much closer now, with Raisin becoming more yellow, less orange.

Second racking in 2013 was on day 71, and one of the things that surprised me was that what looked like an almost dusty surface to the lees was actually potassium bitartrate crystals.  Looks to me that the lees we have now, at least seeing them through the glass and the suspensions, are very similar.  Totally good with me.  Bring the acid down a bit?  I should get a track on the temperatures down there.

That 2013 that 2nd racking was the last before bottling and we had good clarity in the finished wine.  Follow the same path?

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Listened yesterday to Levi Dalton's interview of Larry Turley.  A couple small things reminded me of what we've seen or done.  He keeps the softer raisins in the wine and only discards the hard ones.  (Though he's talking Zin.)

2014 Muscat, day 29, Nov 2 2014

The wine's moved from opaque to translucent - not wildly so, but definitely so.  The fewest, finest bubbles here and there in two of the CBs, and none at all that I see in CB Alice.

2014 Muscat, day 28, Nov 1 2014

Listened yesterday to Levi Dalton's interview of Jerome Prevost, who is thought to make some of the very good champagnes of the world.  At one point Dalton asks Prevost if he puts his wine through malolactic fermentation.    His answer made me feel good. It's episode 210 at I'll Drink to That.

Action in the wine has slowed tremendously (and leaves me wondering whether the wine had gone through malolactic fermentation or not), a constant lazy bubble here and there, but not the steady fine streams of a week ago.

Titrette tests are 13/14 ppm and so I've added 1 ml 10% solution per gallon to the wine, figuring this to raise things by about 15 ppm, then gave everything a good stirring.  Will check levels before the next racking, and if we think we want the level to be higher we'll do the proper thing and add the solution to the receiving CB so it gets properly mixed in.

I also took a much closer look this morning at parts of a book JG gave us a couple of years ago, Let's Make Wine, authored by his cousin Vince Emilio.  The subtitle is An Anthology of Winemaking Instructions, and it is in fact a really good collection.  Best advice and charts lifted from here, there and everywhere combined with personal experience. Better organized than some of my favorite other sources.

2014 Muscat, day 23, Oct 27 2014

Little Raisin, Big Muscat

Pretty good look at the difference in color between the main Muscat and the little Raisin.

In 2013 is was day 35 when I posted that "lemon light" was shining through the wine.  Just a couple of weeks away...

2014 Muscat, day 22, Oct 26 2014

0800:
Gratifyingly little sediment since coming off the gross lees on day 15.  Still a fine gassing off in the CBs, not enough to see a bubbler move in 10 minutes of staring, but easy to see.  Malo?  We haven't done any testing for malolactic acid and the wine is pretty low in SO2 and the cellar isn't cold, so it's real possible.

Raisin is still.

2014 Muscat, day 19, Oct 23 2014

2200:

Mit bung.

Replaced the cb covers with drilled stoppers and airlocks.  That addresses my worries about the caps not being quite air tight once CO2 stops, and feeds my paranoia about popping bungs.  Golly.

Took the little Raisin off of the gross lees: now have one full gallon of it.

How much CO2 and other gas is still getting blown off?  Here's CB Charley on video.  (Not a very steady hand.)

2014 Muscat, day 16, Oct 20 2014

0600:
All 3 CBs sending up bubbles in a very different way then when they came off the lees, many fewer of them and larger and more distinct than the steady stream of fine bubbles before.  Not enough to move the airlocks.  And the top gallon or so of each CB is starting to clarify - not nearly to the point of seeing through but not so opaque with floating particles as the rest of the wine.

Quick Titrette test, looks like under 15 ppm - want to test the pH before making any addition.  Quick acid test looked off the chart - let's mark that down to early morning user error and try again later.  (Used carboy B for these tests.)

2100:
Peace and love in the cellar.  The color change has extended down another four inches in each CB.  Shining a light through the backs of the necks makes a beautiful, hypnotic little show of the bubbles.  Wish you were here.

2014 Muscat, day 15, Oct 19 2014

1100:
Two of the bigboys are bubbling in the 25 to 30 second range.  The third seems to be in Bartleby mode.

Gave some thought to how long to leave things on the gross lees: not going to do anything extended.  Will rack soon.

1800:
Off the gross lees!

Earlier in the day we decided not to go to Homebrew to pick up Clinitest tablets because, after all, I'm not nuts about color scale tests.  When we used to do lots of Accuvin testing it felt good to do, but judging the color shifts is so subjective that it always left me wondering what the right result was and whether I was seeing what I wanted to see.  So we didn't go to buy tablets today, but in the early evening I was kicking around the cellar and found a stash I must have bought last year.  Used them and my eyes said we're between 0.1% and 0.2%

About an inch of gross lees.

So, all doubting aside, it still managed to reinforce my desire to rack off the gross lees, and we did.

We went from 5+5+5+1+1 where both of the one gal jugs were very heavy on lees - one of them was about half lees - to 5+5+5+1-liter.  Doesn't sound so different than last year, but last year we got the 5+5+5 by topping with a lot of the prior year's wine.

How's it seem?  I thought the first CB (now labeled "A") had a bit of bret aroma when I was racking it and I'm still a bot worried about it - this though the lees themselves didn't give off any barnyard smell at all.  B&C were fresh and sweet smelling.

All three CBs had about the same quantity of lees - the picture here is of the middle CB, which had the middling amount.  The book next to the CB is about an inch thick.

2014 Muscat day 13, Oct 17, 2014

Rereading Iverson this morning, while hanging out with the CBs and having my coffee.

• Zero Brix usually indicates about 2% remaining residual sugar.
• Clinitest .2% or .1% is what he considers dry.
• He changes from airlocks to solid bungs at this point, but also watches for them to pop out, just in case.  (I hate that.  It's happened to us and was why I first picked bought caps.)
• He comes off the gross lees three to four weeks after dry.

Still very visible but very fine CO2 production in the carboys.  Jugs much less so.  Will pick up fresh Clinitest tablets this weekend.  Follow last year's pattern, or stay longer on the lees?

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Evening.  The CB's are popping in the 5 to 8 second range.  The gallons in the mind-wandering +1 minute per pop range.

2014 Muscat, day 10, Oct 14 2014

0600:
Still gentle fermentation happening.

I noticed that there's an insane amount of lees in the two 1 gallon jugs - these were filled from the dregs of the primary tank, while all three of the 5 gallon CBs were siphoned off cleanly.  I'll be happy if we have three full CBs without topping off with prior years' wine after the first racking.  Last year we came off the gross lees on day 15, and we lost about 1.5 liters to the lees in each of the 5 gal CBs.  Topping was done with some overflow we had in a growler, but also 2.75 liters of the 2011 Muscat.

I haven't wanted to get 6 gal or 6.5 gal CBs because lifting the 5 gals is enough of a bear, but it would have been nice to have had all the juice go into large containers together.  For that matter, maybe we should rehabilitate the 100 liter floating lid steel tank: I don't trust it for long term aging, but it would have been fine for this phase.

Took a quick reading of the Raisin with the long scale hydrometer since it fits right into the jug without spilling - 3 Brix.