Rack and Return

There has been a good bit of wine maintenance throughout this week. Stephen has been busy racking off the Touriga and the Petit Verdot. A wine is racked off once the wine gets "stinky". When wine sits in the barrel on the gross lees it can start to make the wine smell a bit like eggs, this is due to the presence of sulfur. Lucky for us, there is an easy and common fix to get rid of the sulfur. When a wine is racked off it is pumped from the barrels into a stainless steel tank. Then the barrels are cleaned with a pressure washer to get rid of all of the gross lees. Gross lees are a combination of inactive yeast and any small particles of grape pulp or skin that were small enough to get through the press. These particles settle out of the wine over time and collect on the bottom of a barrel. When you rack the wine out of the barrel, it is important to leave the lees on the bottom in order to get rid of them.

By moving the wine from barrel to tank and back, the wine is oxygenated. Here's the quick fix: the new oxygen (O₂) in the wine actually binds with the sulfur (S) to create sulfur dioxide (SO₂). This gas comes out of the wine and like magic, the wine is wonderful again! Cheers to the joys of chemistry...