Rack and Roll
News flash: Making wine while hungover is less enjoyable than it otherwise might be. I can confirm this from my experience the other morning. I’m not talking “let’s do another tequila shot” hungover. It’s just that the prior night I enjoyed more in one sitting of the Nicholas Ranch 2006 Chardonnay than is generally recommended. But it’s just so tasty. Nonetheless, I fought through the pain, and by lunchtime the new Pinot Noir had been racked into two 5-gallon glass carboys.
The act of racking is really a test to determine your level of greed. The idea is to siphon the wine from one container to another, while leaving whatever sediment has settled in the bottom behind. Of course, that sediment is sitting in wine, and the more wine you leave, the less wine you have to drink later. And there’s the rub - do I try to retain every last drop of wine that I can, knowing that I risk transferring some of the sediment into the new container at the same time, or do I act like a reasonable human, and be willing to spare the cloudy stuff at the bottom for the betterment of the finished product. I usually fall somewhere in between, and in this case that meant pouring a gallon and a half of mush down the storm drain in the back alley. I swear there was a decent glass in there somewhere. After that, I inoculated the wine with malolactic bacteria and stored it in the garage to do its business. And with that, the aging season has begun.
News flash: Making wine while hungover is less enjoyable than it otherwise might be. I can confirm this from my experience the other morning. I’m not talking “let’s do another tequila shot” hungover. It’s just that the prior night I enjoyed more in one sitting of the Nicholas Ranch 2006 Chardonnay than is generally recommended. But it’s just so tasty. Nonetheless, I fought through the pain, and by lunchtime the new Pinot Noir had been racked into two 5-gallon glass carboys.
The act of racking is really a test to determine your level of greed. The idea is to siphon the wine from one container to another, while leaving whatever sediment has settled in the bottom behind. Of course, that sediment is sitting in wine, and the more wine you leave, the less wine you have to drink later. And there’s the rub - do I try to retain every last drop of wine that I can, knowing that I risk transferring some of the sediment into the new container at the same time, or do I act like a reasonable human, and be willing to spare the cloudy stuff at the bottom for the betterment of the finished product. I usually fall somewhere in between, and in this case that meant pouring a gallon and a half of mush down the storm drain in the back alley. I swear there was a decent glass in there somewhere. After that, I inoculated the wine with malolactic bacteria and stored it in the garage to do its business. And with that, the aging season has begun. 
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