Racking

Racking is a process in making wine where you use a small tube and siphon the wine off of the leas at the bottem of your carboy, start at the middle and work your way down. The point is not to stir up the leas at the bottem, so when you get down to the leas pull your hose out. Its ok to lose that last bit of wine in the bottem of your carboy. You have to be carefull not to get a hose that is to big in diameter, because it will stir the leas up in the process. I prefere to use a fish aquarm airline hose.

Once you have racked your wine into another container wash your carboy with hot tap water for about 5-10 minutes. When I'm making wine in 1 gallon carboys at this step I just use a funnel and pour the wine back into the carboy. If I'm racking a 5 gallon carboy I rack into a 5 gallon bucket, once the carboy is clean I use a large diameter hose and siphon it back into the carboy.

You will need to rack your wine the first time when you see that it has just about stopped fermitting. A 5 gallon batch takes about 4 weeks, and a one gallon batch takes about 3 weeks. After the first rack you should top off the carboy to the neck with either the same type of wine or with water. Once you rack it wait about 7 days and rack it again. Wait another 7 days and rack it again. The next racking will be time for bottling.

Besure to leave me some feedback in the message board if this helped you. This tutorial was written by Eric Richards.