Working 8 hour shifts during the day (8-5) allows for a great deal of work to be done, especially when there are 15 people. Among the multitude of jobs that need completing on a daily basis are rackings, transfers, barreling down, additions, and most of all, cleaning. The winery, over the busy vintage period, became covered in sticky juice, messy yeast and yeast food, wine and grape skins...
There was very little time to do any cleaning over that period, so the few weeks following the harvest was spent heavily cleaning presses, floors, tanks, lines, hoses, and all the other bits and bobs that are used in the processing of the grapes and juice.
Racking is an important part of winemaking, to ensure that the wine that has fermented with the addition of the yeast is moved off the yeast that has become sediment at the bottom of the tank. This movement is carefully managed to ensure that the wine is at the correct level of fermentation.
Racking a 90,000 litre tank can take up to 3.5 hrs, whereas a 5,000 litre tank will take about 20 mins - half an hour. You pump the wine from a valve set just a little lower than the door, which is always above where the yeast lees settle. Once this valve has been reached, you open the door, attach a 'racking plate' to a hose and use this to suck the last of the wine, closely monitoring the level of the plate upon the lees. The lees are then discarded down the drain. The wine that has been moved into another tank will become clearer and clearer after each racking, and will be fined with varoius agents too.
Following the emptying of a tank in this way, it is essential to clean the empty tank, to remove the lees and the tartrates that have built up during fermentation.
Transferring wine is a very similar process to racking but there are no lees as the wine is finer and clearer.
There are obviously a number of saftey checks that one must carry out before and during the process of racking and transferring. One of the most important of these is very simple, but if not done, can lead to a terrible mishap. On one occasion I got the raw end of it... As with anything, if you are sucking out of a vessel, there must be a vent of sorts to allow the vessel to stay in its original state. Having checked the lid of the tank a few times, I was happy that it was all going well and went off to take my lunch break. Upon my return, the lid had blown or dropped shut, and the tank was imploding...
The roof had sucked down and the inside of the tank was also sucked in a little. In order to stop the implosion, I had to pry the lid of the tank open a little to allow some air in, then kick it as hard as i could to get the lid off. To repair the damage, when I was pumping another job into the same tank, I waited until the tank was 3/4 full and closed the lid firmly. Of course, with the volume of wine in the tank increasing, the pressure pushed the roof back up!
Barrelling has the same goals as racking, generally speaking. The aim is to move the wine from the lees to enable it to be fined and become clearer. Reds have been more commonly barreled, but it is done with whites, especially the pinot gris and chardonnay varieties. The process is a lot more fiddly than the racking, as the barrels are only 225 litres, and therefore fill very quickly, even when using a very small pump. Overflowing barrels is very common, as they fill so quickly, and occasionally there is foam that comes out very fast.
