Rack and Roll

Hey Deadliest Catch, I've got a job for you guys!

Racking.  Probably the most asked question I come across as a winemaker, "What the hell is it"?  Rest assured, it's the absolute least sexy thing in winemaking.  Period.  Much more interesting in billiards, where there it's a prelude to the game.  A preview explanation: it is gentle and considerate siphoning.  You're probably thinking "Yeah Dave, sounds fascinating.  Don't care. Don't care!"  Oh but wait my little gulper du vin, what I have to tell you will hopefully put some perspective on that next sip of Trailhead you take.

After primary fermentation (converting a grape's sugar into alcohol and CO2) a red wine's next journey is secondary fermentation.  This process entails getting malic acid in wine converted over to softer lactic acid.  The average "home winemaker" usually finds out about this conversion shortly after corks go flying across the basement with fizzy wine spraying everywhere.  This "secondary" fermentation creates CO2.  Pressure builds up behind the cork and excitement ensues (and an afternoon of clean-up).  In commercial winemaking, this process is initiated by the addition of a malic acid-loving bacteria that gets crack'n on the conversion.  When secondary is finished, I check to see if the process is complete by using paper chromatography.  This is a cool-tool.  Colored spots on special paper show the presence or absence of malic acid.  Think pregnancy test.  If it's your color, you're a happy camper.   A sample is sent off to a wine lab for confirmation and if the process is really, really done... it's racking time.

Wines, particularly young red wines, benefit from aeration.  A little O2 does a host of good things for wine's development.  Later in a red wine's life, not so much.  Without sounding like a chemistry geek and going on with techno-babble-speak, suffice it to say, in a red wine's beginning (borrowing a Martha-ism here), air is a "good thing".  Racking helps to get air into wine.

Being a garagiste-winery-situation, wine production is rarely easy.  You take a garage that was never intended on being used for the production of wine and fight every thing that's lacking.  Now here's some fun... most of the big stuff I do is outside... in the weather.  In Plain/Lake Wenatchee during winter, there's snow and ice everywhere.  

Racking (okay, I'll define it now) is simply the act of taking wine out of barrel (or tank if that's the case) without disturbing the sediment which has accumulated on the bottom.  The wine is transfered (splashed into, therefore aerated) into a bigger tank, barrels get rinsed to remove the sediment and the wine from the tank put back into barrel.  No big deal, right?  Yeah sure... remember that ice and snow?  Think of it like this, you're walking out onto a hockey rink that was just watered down.  Oh, you're carrying an 80-100 pound empty barrel (remember the wood is soaked with wine, not light and not aiding your balance).  But now, that hockey rink has humps, bumps, frozen ruts from where you drove a week earlier when it was slush and... well, you get the idea.  Damn dangerous!  It's so slick, it's nearly impossible to just stand in one spot, let alone walk across it, let alone carry an empty wine barrel!  Just so you know, the barrels are rinsed outside on a barrel washing device, thus necessitating this death-defying trek.  In a non-garagiste setting, I would be rinsing barrels inside the building with waste water going into a floor drain, remaining warm and dry and listening to some New Order on the stereo.  The biggest hazard would be running out of beer.  Not cracking my head open.

So, why am I not in the hospital?  Why am I not scheduled to see my orthopedic surgeon?  Because somebody very smart, very clever, made a contraption with metal studs that straps onto the bottom of your shoes.  These devices are to my winemaking like heat tiles are to the bottom of the Space Shuttle.  With out them, I'm cooked (If you're the person responsible for designing the brand I use, just know I'm putting in a good word to the Nobel Committee).

In the spring, we'll be back to gravel driveways, the chirping of birds, budding fruit trees, puffy white cumulus clouds against a sea-blue sky and... more racking.  Minus the personal injury stuff.

Stay upright,

David