As part of our everyday maintenance, the tanks need our attention. Generally speaking, the tanks are much more stable than the barrels. The main place they can go wrong is where the wine makes contact with air—at the top hatch, or manway, the opening at the very top of the tank. Once again, we use the sulphur/citric solution to treat the exposed wine surface and the underside of the manway door. Sometimes, despite our efforts, pesky film yeasts, appear on the exposed surface of the wine. It looks like a whitish film, sometimes with pronounced veins in it, like marble (I don’t have a pic of this cuz it never happens at Babcock J). If we see that, we use an extra strong sulphur spray, and that usually fixes it up within a few days. In addition, 3 times/week, we gas the top of the tanks with C02 which helps prevent oxidation. We just insert a bit of tubing running from a C02 cylinder into the tank and let it run for a few minutes, leaving blanket of C02 which sits on top of the wine, protecting it from air.
That’s our day-to-day maintenance of full tanks. Once we’ve emptied a tank, we need to clean it, thoroughly. In the case of a tank where the wine was just passing through (for example, a filtered wine, just there for a few days before bottling) a spray-down with the water hose might be enough, (until we have to use it again, at which point, we’ll sanitize). For tougher jobs, we’ll use our tank washer, a wand that goes in through the hole in the center of the top of the tank (known as the “guth”). The cylinder at the end spins around like in a dishwasher:
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| tank washer on top of tank with guth to the left and manway to the right |
In the pic, a water hose is connected to the washer. We can blast hot water of 180 degrees F through there, and if that doesn’t do it, we can hook up hoses and a pump to circulate a caustic tank cleaner to remove residue. After the tank cleaner, we run a citric solution through to neutralize, and then water. AND, if the tank cleaner wash doesn’t do it, we crawl inside and scrub and scrub every inch till it’s shiny clean. Usually, every used tank needs a bit of a scrub to make it perfect.
In addition to the tanks, themselves, all the attachments need to be squeaky clean as well. When we’re going to use a tank, we strip off the valves (2 or 3, depending on the tank), take them apart, scrub them—first with proxy carb and then with PAA-- and put them back together again):
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| 2-inch ball-valve from a tank |
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| same valve in pieces |
For all the fittings, we have a parts board of clamps, gaskets and other pipe attachments that allow us to make our hoses (and wines) go in every direction/configuration imaginable:
Finally, the cleanliness of the hoses we use is integral to the final cleanliness of the wine. We run PAA through them for 10 minutes before and after we use them, and keep them up on racks off the floor. A couple times/year, we do a thorough cleaning of the hoses, where we run cleaner, along with a squishy ball (like a nerf ball but more sticky/tacky) through. We get out all the hoses, hook them up to a pump, and mix up a big (80 gallon) batch of the sudsy, degreaser-type cleaner. Then the fun starts, as we shove the ball in one end (on the “out” side of the pump—it would mess up the pump if it went through):
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| putting the ball in the hose at the output end of the pump, top. The intake end is at the bottom of the pump. |
We reattach the hose, turn on the pump, and the ball goes for a jolly ride through about 250 feet of hose. It’s cool, cuz you can see it go on its journey, pushing all the built-up goo ahead of it.
The ball pops out at the other end, we shut off the pump, grab the ball and start it over again. We do this several times until we’re convinced that our hoses are spotless.
This time of year, we have a whole new cleaning regimen to get into as harvest fast approaches. Next post: harvest prep!
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