Winter can be a lonely time for a cellar rat. The hustle and bustle of harvest has faded away and the wines are sleeping in the cave. Outside the air is almost freezing, making the 60 degrees of the cave seem cozy. Most of the work during the off-season can be done solo, leaving you with the barrels as your companions.

In this post I talked about the endless process of keeping the barrels topped. With 2500 barrels to keep full to the brim there’s plenty to do. The other major process that takes place year-round is called racking. Racking is another element in making clean wine. Cleaning the barrels throughout the process reduces the likelihood of bacteria or mold affecting the wine. It’s a technique that’s been used for thousands of years. It involves moving the wine from one vessel to another. There are several reasons that racking is useful to the winemaker. After fermentation and the grapes are pressed, small solid particles, including the yeast, remain present in the wine. These sediments slowly settle on the bottom of the barrel like silt does on a river bed. Instead of trying to filter these particles out, we simply draw the wine off of the top of the sediment and into another vessel. This mixture of yeast and other particles is known as the lees. You may have seen a wine label mention that it was aged sur lees. This essentially means that it was never racked.

It’s for this reason that we have closed top stainless steel tanks as well as open ones. During fermentation the reaction creates enough CO2 to protect the juice from oxygen. Afterwards the wine must not be exposed to oxygen in large volumes, so the wine is racked from the barrels into the controllable environment of the tank. Often we pump nitrogen through the wine, essentially pushing the oxygen out of the liquid and filling the remaining space in the tank. Then we rinse the barrels using a specialized hose attachment that’s really just a glorified sprinkler. Then we steam clean them which uses only 2 gallons of water compared to the 22 gallons that are used during conventional hot water cleaning. When the barrels have been cleaned and drained the wine is returned to them. This process usually gets repeated several times before the wine is bottled. With each successive racking the wine becomes more and more clear. We call it clarification. Additionally to finish the process, we have high quality filtration technology which removes microscopic solids giving the wines a jewel-like characteristic.

The challenge lies in the fact that the large tanks are outside and the barrels are all inside. The barrels are all packed into the cave like a jigsaw puzzle and removing a particular barrel often means moving an entire row to get to it. It’s the winemaker’s job to plan where to put the barrels and when to rack them but it’s the cellar rat’s job to get the barrels out! I must admit that I admire our Cellar Master Aron’s ability to maneuver the forklift in the close quarters of the cave.

Until next time! Salut!