Racking the Rhode Island Cab Franc

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Published: Wednesday, 18 July 2012 22:48

Written by David DeCiero

It was a Tuesday night, and after the MLF finally completed on some straggler carboys of MLF, I was ready to rack.  Racking always seems like a pain in the butt to me.  It involves cleaning a bunch of items, all with the express purpose of moving the wine off of its sediment.  Since this wine had taken so long to go through MLF, I wanted to get it done as soon as possible.  So, I decided that tuesday night was as good as any.  I started by mixing up some One-Step.  I then sanitized each of the three carboys that were going to be the receiving vessels.  I also made sure to run my autosiphon through the process to make sure it was as clean as could be.  I then went ahead and racked my 6 gallon carboy, and 2 1 gallon jugs into new containers.  I ended up losing about 2 L of wine through the transfer of the 8 gallons.  There were some pretty heavy lees on the 6 gallon one, so I lost quite a bit there.

I had taken previous pH readings for this wine and it was around 3.37.  So, it needed about 30 ppm of Sulfite.  I made a 10% sulfite solution (10 g of K meta in 100 ml of water) and added 12 ml to the 6 gallon carboy, and 2 to each of the 1 gallon carboys.  Now, it gets some alone time for a couple months to sit.