Racking the Wine

Wine Jugs Showing Lees

My tenth edition of Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary among its many definitions for the word rack gives this one for the transitive verb: "to draw off (as wine) from the lees."  I have been making wine since 1978, and racking is a most important part of the process, if you wish to make a wine that you would be proud to serve at your dinner table and that will compete favorably with commercially produced ones.  There are other factors that go into producing a good to excellent wine, but more about those later.




Wine Being Racked

Those lees mentioned in the definition are the result of many and different causes most important of which include dead and dying yeast cells and excess insoluble acids and other insoluble materials that if not deposited would affect the clarity of the wine and give it a hazy appearance.  I generally rack my wines six times over the course of the twelve months from the time that I place the fermenting musts into glass containers to the time that I bottle the finished wine.  The fourth racking that I have just completed early this April is a little late by about one month by my standard, and there are two more rackings to be done before the filtering and final bottling of the wine in late July and early August.  Racking is important to prevent off flavors entering the wine which are primarily due to the decaying yeasts and hazes.  These off flavors can utterly destroy the quality of what would be an otherwise good tasting wine, giving it a heavy rotten egg smell and taste.




An Inexpensive Siphon

 In fact, racking is a decanting process which is carefully done to prevent redistributing the lees back into the liquid.  For the home wine maker this is easily accomplished by using a simple, inexpensive siphon devise which serves as both a pump and siphon and is fitted with a removable tip that draws the liquid into it from above the lees.