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.

Greek Wild Onions



Broad Leaf Plant

 At this time of the year I usually get to work planting seeds for the coming summer season.  In fact though, this is also a time to harvest, but the harvest that I am thinking of is not at all a generally known one.  In New England in February most people know that it's time to collect the sap from the sugar maple and convert it into maple syrup, maple butter, maple candy, and other maple products.  Most people don't think of this as a harvest, but, in fact, for that part of the world it is the first harvest of the new season (year).





Deep in Hard Soil

Here, in this part of Greece I just harvested what the Greeks, especially the older Greeks, call βολβοί, or bulbs; these belong to a wild plant commonly known in Europe as the Tassel Hyacinth.  I was first introduced to these bulbs by my father when I was a child growing up in Haverhill, Massachusetts.  My father used to call them Greek Wild Onions.  When they are prepared properly, they taste nothing like an onion, and they are pink in color and they can be bitter to the taste.  They are not easy to harvest, requiring a 27 centimeter long fork or shovel to dig the bulbs out of the ground in what can be very hard packed soil.  Fortunately the bulbs produce easy to spot long, broad leaves and tassel like flowers, so finding them is not a chore.

Before Cleaning and Trimming

To prepare the bulbs for eating, the leaves are removed as well as the outer skin and roots of each bulb much as you would do an onion.  This gets to be a tedious affair since the bulbs excrete a sticky liquid that tends to get in the way of cleaning them.  Once the bulbs are clean they are soaked in water for a few days changing the water three or four times a day much as one does when curing olives.  This water pretreatment tends to remove some of the bitter materials within the bulbs, but more of this is accomplished when the bulbs are boiled in water for about 5 minutes.  Boiling the bulbs this way is repeated two or three times draining and replacing the water with fresh portions each time.  Finally, the cooked bulbs are rinsed, placed in a jar, covered in vinegar, capped and kept in the refrigerator for storage.  With the vinegar rinsed off, the bulbs are served in small portions at a time sprinkled with olive oil, salt and pepper.

Washed and Ready for Vinegar Storage