Rack 'n' Roll

Natural methods of clarification are preferred in winemaking. Anything we can do to avoid harsh filtration will result in better-quality wine. Racking is one of these techniques. Simply put, we let a container of wine sit for a period of time, so that the stuff floating around in suspension will eventually settle to the bottom. Then, we draw the wine off the sediment into another container, leaving cleaner, clearer wine. The process may be repeated several times during a wine's lifetime. Red wine in barrel, for example may be racked 3-6 times in the course of a year.

Every type and size of vessel we use has to have this racking capability, so that requires some specially-designed equipment. Take a typical wine tank, for example:

The best tanks have 2 doors (plus a hatch on the top), and 2 valves (plus a small valve for taking samples, seen here on the upper left just below the temperature gauge). The upper door in this pic is the racking door, and the upper valve, just below it and to the left is the racking valve. The lower valve is the transfer valve, and we use it when we're simply moving wine, and not expecting any sediment on the bottom (after it's been filtered, for example). To rack a tank, we attach the hose to the racking valve and pump the wine out down to the level of the valve,at which point the pump will start sucking air. Then, it's safe to open the racking door. We detach the hose from the valve, sanitize the end and stick it in through the door and into the wine, just below the surface, and start pumping. We manually move the hose down with the level of the wine, keeping it as close to the surface of the wine as possible so as not to suck up any of the stuff on the bottom. We may have anywhere from 1 to about 6 inches of "stuff" (lees, tartrates, bentonite--depending on what stage of the winemaking process we're at). The sediment is usually quite a different colour from the wine, so it's easy to see where the wine ends and the sediment begins and shut off the pump accordingly, leaving all the goop in the bottom.

Racking barrels is a little different since there' s only the one hole at the top. For this we need something called a bulldog:



It's a wand we put in through the bunghole down to the bottom of the barrel. The wine is drawn in through the holes at the pointy end (shown in the first picture) up through the wand, and through the attached hose to its destination. There is an adjustable spike at the bottom that rests at the bottom of the barrel,  so we change the level at which the wine is drawn in, keeping it above the sediment. Since we can't see into the barrel to see the exact level of the sediment, there's a bit of trial and error. At the other end of the wand (shown in the second picture) there is a sight glass which helps with that. As we slowly (so as not to disturb the sediment) lower the wand down, we use a flashlight to watch in the sight glass for any murkiness or blurring. If we see that, we know our spike isn't long enough to keep the holes above the sediment. The only thing we can do, then, is hold the bulldog off the bottom and try to keep it above the goo. It takes about 5 minutes to  empty the barrel, and it's pretty heavy to hold it when it's attached to a hose full of wine. After doing one barrel that way, we may adjust the spike for the next barrels.

When we get the level right, it looks like this:

This is not as exact as racking the tank, because we can't see what we're doing, so we often lose some good wine along with the sediment. In the case of the lees left in the tanks, we pump it out and it gets distributed in the vineyard. For the barrel lees, we want to get any of the good wine that's still in there. Once we've emptied the barrel, we roll the barrel over and dump out the sediment/wine mixture that's left and put it into glass carboys. We let it settle out again, and then rack the carboy, putting all the various leftovers together to eventually become a basic blended table wine.

To rack these small vessels, we use a siphoning hose. It's a bit of a trick to learn this technique and usually involves inhaling some wine the first few times.

Here it is, done right:

We use this racking technique when we're topping barrels, as well, but more on that, next time.