Racking the Beaverdale Merlot

I decided the time had finally come to rack the Merlot - the first home brewed wine I had tried. I decided to take a hydrometer reading, even though I expected to see little or no movement and would wrack it anyway. I took a picture for future reference:



It was hard to get a reading as I couldn't see through the glass clearly, and the opening of the demijohn was very tight. Zooming in on the photograph was actually the best way of deciding on a reading. I put it down as 0.995.

Day	Time per bubble (secs)	Gravity
0	infinite	1.078
3	2
5	9
9	15
12	18
15	30
21<	55	1.000
24	infinite (after hydrometer reading)	0.998
27	infinite	0.997
34	infinite	0.996
44	infinite	0.995

As I said, I was determined to wrack it anyway. Its had a long time in primary now and I don't think the gravity is going anywhere now.

Having sanitised some tubing, a gromit and an airlock, I placed the full demijohn on the work surface, and a freshly sanitised demijohn on the floor in the washing up bowl (to catch any spillage). I had a couple of different bits of tubing, with and without taps, but having had a bit of a play with syphoning earlier I decided that I couldn't find a way of starting the syphon without sucking anyway, so I went for a basic tube connected to a stiff tube with a hole a couple of centimetres from the bottom. This stiff tube goes into the full demijohn and the hole allows the clear wine to be syphoned off while leaving the sediment at the bottom.

The instructions actually didn't mention transferring to a secondary container, but given the next steps were to help with clearing the wine, it seemed sensible to rack it at this point. I committed the sin of starting the syphoning by sucking, and quickly putting the end into the demijohn. It worked perfectly, sadly so well I didn't even get a taste of the wine. The only problem I found was that I left a little more wine in the original demijohn than I wanted, but after a second attempt to collect a little more failed, I decided I would rather lose a glass of wine than ruin all the wine so left it alone.

Returning to the instructions, I poured the contents of the sachet labelled Stabiliser into the demijohn, placed the sanitised grommit in the opening, and with my cleaned thumb over the opening I shook the bottle for several minutes to release the co2. Whenever I removed my thumb, there was a strong hiss of co2 escaping, so I continued shaking until no fizz occurred. I then placed the airlock into the grommit.



I will repeat the shaking several times a day for the next 3 or 4 days as instructed before adding the ingredients that make up the finings.