Racking & Blending
Racking
Racking stands for taking the wine out of a barrel, cleaning the barrel, and then putting the wine back into the same or another barrel. We rack wine for multiple reasons. First and foremost, to remove sediments in a barrel. Secondly, to aerate the wine to remove dissolved gasses from fermentation and import oxygen to accelerate aging in very tannic wines. Thirdly, racking always precedes mixing wines from different barrels or moving the wine from one barrel to another. We can rack a barrel by sucking the wine out with a pump or force of gravity or pushing it out with an inert gas. We do not use pumps as some argue that even the gentlest pumps can be detrimental to wine. We use gravity flow whenever possible and inert gas in rare circumstances.
Racking is always combined with cleaning the barrel. We describe the cleaning process on the page "Tank & Barrel Management."
The following picture shows the steps in racking two different barrels while moving the contents between the barrels. It illustrates a barrel switch that we decided to do for the 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon in early 2015 to give the wine in both barrels some exposure to new oak.
Blending
We rack different barrels into a blending tank, let the mixture integrate for a few days, and then move the blend back into barrels or the bottling machine. Blending is essential in large wineries where the winemaker has access to various barrels of various characteristics that may complement each other. In our case, we did not have that many options to blend because we produced only between one and three barrels and only in 2012 had Merlot in addition to Cabernet Sauvignon. This changed in 2016 when the second vineyard started to produce Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot. By 2019 the 2016 vintage was ready for bottling. So beginning in 2019, we must decide whether to bottle a single blend consisting of all the varietals harvested or bottle multiple blends with different portions of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot.
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Last updated: June 2, 2022