Racking

Finally I've got something to write about again!

Yesterday we racked the barrels, and hurrah, the wine is somewhat drinkable. I wasn't expecting that so soon, making it was a nice surprise, even if it needs more time to become clear and develop some character.

Racking in Hungarian is "féjtes", which might be related to the word for head, "fej", as racking involves separating the good wine off the top of the barrel from the sediment,or lees (üledék in Hungarian), at the bottom.  If the wine is left too long on the lees it can develop an off-taste. The phrase "sur lie", which one might encounter for example on a Muscadet bottle, translates from the French as "on lees", meaning a wine bottled directly from the barrel without racking, which gives a distinctive yeasty aroma and taste.

I travelled down in the rain to Siófok, dropped off one of the daughters at the grandmother and headed off to meet Sanyi Bácsi at the cellar.

Sanyi had already been there a little while. With the help of another man who had been there earlier, he had siphoned off the red wine into a large plastic container (a lot larger in practice than it looks in the picture below!) and thrown out the gunk - the sediment, - that had accumulated at the bottom.

 

Together we washed out the barrel. Or to be more accurate, Sanyi did the hard work and I carried the buckets. This was slow. It involved pouring in a bucket of water, plugging it up, rolling and shaking the barrel around for a minute or two, then draining out the water. And doing it again and again, until the water came out reasonably clear.

Next, turn the barrel upside down and let the remaining water drip out. And wait for the barrel to get dry.

While waiting, we moved onto the next barrels.  Luckily the first barrel was dry by the time we needed the first large plastic container again to drain off the third barrel, as we had only two such containers.

Once the barrel was dry, the next step was to put Kénlap (a sulphuric strip) on a piece of wire, set it alight, lower it into the empty barrel, push in the bung quickly, and wait until it had burned off before removing the bung again.  The stink this gave off was overwhelming and made us cough. Healthy work...

The purpose of this step is to remove oxygen from the barrel, so the wine won't oxidise after it is put back in.  As the wine is put back, the gas comes out.

   

Once that was done, we could finally siphon the wine back again into the barrel from the plastic container, and the first barrel was finished.

Having missed out on draining the first barrel, when we started on the second, I discovered that this step is quite time-consuming too. It's because the plastic containers are in the "présház" on a higher level than the cellar. So while it's easy to siphon back from the containers into the barrel, it's obviously not possible in the 'up-direction'.

So, we siphoned the wine from the barrel into buckets with a length of hose pipe, quickly swapping the buckets when they filled up. While one of us was doing the siphoning, the other was carrying up the buckets and emptying them out into the plastic container. But that was the easy part, because at some point the flow from the hosepipe becomes too slow. Then we had to take out the bung from the front of the barrel and let the remainder flow out. This isn't so easily controlled as siphoning, so we had a row of buckets ready, and quickly filled them up one after the other, until the barrel was empty.

As the bottom of the barrel is reached, the wine becomes cloudier. The last bucket of all is a murky mud-like gunk. I was surprised how horrid it looked, having expected something more like the sediment that collected at the bottom of the must when we pressed the grapes! The lees consists of deposits of dead yeast or residual yeast and other particles, as well as the sediment from the grapes.  The pictures below shows how delightful the lees looks!

 

So on we went with this process until the three barrels were finished. They will sit there to let the wine clarify and we can repeat the process until the wine is crystal clear.

The 105 litre barrel on the left is full to the brim with all our red; the next one - 200l - is full with white; and the last one - 300l - is not quite full.

The wine is drinkable, although further settling and racking is needed to clarify it, and develop its taste.  The white is a bit acidic unfortunately.   The red is quite alright - albeit lacking any depth or character.

So, a few takeaways:

And in the picture below you can see how cloudy the white is.  I don't know how alcoholic is the wine, although probably the majority of the sugar has turned to alcohol. I wanted to use the Hydrometer to test the sugar level but I was told it only works on the must ... not sure about this because it contradicts with what I read.  Anyway, I guess I'll just have to drink a litre and see how I feel afterwards :-)