Rack 'em!

Big night tonight! We pressed the Pinot and transferred it to eight-gallon "tanks" and racked the Chardonnay into a Carboy.

The Pinot was pretty easy given Patrick's new expertise: he'd pressed the Chardonnay a week before while I was teaching wine marketing...

The first step was collecting the must and juice from the Rubbermaid "fermenters" and adding it to the press. We got a lot of juice; in fact, we didn't use much of the pressed juice given how the amount of free run. (I had read earlier today that winemakers don't tend to use all of the pressed juice (or any) given how tannic it can be. Thank goodness for a few extra minutes on the treadmill -- I had gotten through my general business reading with 10 minutes to spare for wine information!)

After we finished pressing the Pinot, we racked the Chard into a Carboy. At first, I was a little frustrated because we don't have a kitchen funnel and the thought of slowly pouring eight gallons of white juice into a small hole seemed inefficient at best. Then, I thought of the beautiful pewter Port funnel used as a Symington gift and I couldn't resist -- too perfect. We sanitized it along with the pitcher and therefore had the perfect tools with which to rack our Chardonnay!

Our juice easily filled its six-gallon capacity. I hated to dump a pitcher of extra Chard, but it had to be done, as our new vessel was full! All parties are now resting peacefully in a warmish crawl space off of our garage.

Reading this, you might think: "I wonder why they didn't plan this in advance?" You're not alone, as my lack of planning and fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants approach to winemaking is most frustrating to my "enologist" husband, Patrick! In short, if I'd done all the reading about what might go wrong, the time required, etc., I probably would've put the project off another year.

The worst thing that could happen is that we "wasted" a fabulous fall day in a vineyard picking grapes and subsequent time enjoying each others' company in a new way, after a good bottle of wine, of course. So I figure it's an experiment well spent :)