How To Rack Wine When Making

Racking is an essential part to making any sound wine.

How to rack wine when making. This is the chunky fruit lees that collects at the bottom of your fermentation vessel. Let the wine settle out for one or two days then rack off of the thick layer of gross lees. This is done to get all of the sediment off the bottom of the main container. Over time yeast and other sediment will precipitate out of your wine and settle to the bottom.

Moving the wine into a demi john allows us to attach a bung and airlock. The first racking should occur shortly after pressing the wine. Racking wine is necessary because you do not want the wine to sit on excessive amounts of sediment over extended periods of time. If your wine is left on the gross lees for too long you ll pick up off flavors and aromas.

Depending on the amount of wine you re making you may need a significant amount of space to do this or just a tabletop and the floor of your kitchen. This is the most critical racking and can be a make or break situation for the wine. You might start seeing bubbles through the airlock shortly after this but it s probably just the air inside the carboy expanding as it warms. In terms of making wine the definition of racking wine is the process of transferring a wine or must from one fermenter to the next so as to leave the sediment behind.

The best thing you can do to avoid being caught out by a false measurement of completeness is to move your wine to somewhere warm for a week or so before starting to take readings. Racking our welch s grape fruit juice wine into another container. There are two reasons to rack your wine. Place the wine that you wish to rack on a raised surface.

Take the vessel containing the wine with the sediment and open it up then place it up on a raised surface. If it is a red wine pressing will usually be after the primary fermentation is complete. It is a process that on average should be performed 2 to 4 times throughout the winemaking process. Racking and clearing a wine it is usual to move a wine from a fermenting bucket into a demijohn because at this point in the fermentation process there is a lot less activity from the yeast they are producing less co2 which forms a protective barrier on top of the wine.

Doing so in a timely manner will aid in the clarification of the wine and help to inhibit the production of unwanted off flavors.