when to rack?

I have a question about a couple of things on the Jack Keller web site:

He is says (excerpts below) that the transfer from primary to secondary fermentation should contain all the yeast and the secondary fermentation can sit for up to three months before the first rack if it is stirred once a week.?

Is this right? Is it typical to do it this way? Are there any adverse consequences that people have found leaving all that yeast on the bottom of the fermentation vessel for so long - even with weekly stirring?

The E.C. Kraus web site

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says transfer from primary to secondary should be done with a siphon without stirring up the sediment, and that bottling is done 4-6 weeks later, as soon as it clears and the hydrometer reading is between .990 and .998.

What is the right way?

The relevant excerpts from jackkeller.net are:

This is from the page about the first transfer from primary to secondary fermentation:

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Transfer does not mean rack. While the solids are strained off and discarded, the liquid and lees are poured through a funnel into the secondary. The lees are important at this stage because many of the live yeast cells will have settled into the lees. Without them, fermentation will get very sluggish or stick (stop altogether). The best procedure is to stir the wine to get the lees into suspension, then pour the liquid through a large funnel into the secondary. If the funnel has a fine-mesh screen insert, use it to filter out the gross lees (large bits of pulp). The fine lees, containing the yeast, will pass through the mesh.

This is on the page about racking:

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"The rule is, as long as there are fresh deposits on the bottom after a regular interval (30 to 60 days), even if they are just a light dusting, the wine should be racked. ... It is not necessary that the interval between rackings be 30 days, 45 days or 60 days, but it should not be less than three weeks. It is perfectly okay to leave the wine on the lees for three months. Beyond that and the wine enters a danger zone caused by dead yeast cells breaking down -- rotting. While this can cause off-flavors and odors if allowed to go on too long, the bigger danger is the formation of hydrogen-sulfide gas, which smells like rotten eggs and can be the death of the wine. But if the lees are stirred every week or so, neither the off flavors, off odors nor hydrogen-sulfide gas form. Indeed, the wine is actually improved by extended contact with the lees as long as they are stirred frequently."

Thanks

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nl3wsch72gfdjkpq
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Yes,of course, Jack Keller is right.

Guy

Reply to
guy

this is something I have wondered about too. I dont have any books that remotely suggest transferring the gross lees to the secondary, but Mr Keller is well regarded by all. I think this thread could probably use someone giving it some thoughtful rationale in the interest of many of us learners. "Jack is right" may indeed be right, but I'd like to know why, and if lots of you are doing this when so many texts are fairly clear in saying the opposite.

Reply to
snpm

site

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fermentation:

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racking:

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I do my first racking off the gross lees VERY soon after fermentation has finished. I do not suck ANY of the lees up but I do save them and put them in another container and let them settle some more. After a few days, I rack again and save the wine for top up wine and throw away the gross lees. If you are dealing with several hundred pounds of fruit, you can recover quite a bit of wine this way.

I do a second racking in about three months. I smell the lees and if the lees smell sweet, I add them back into the wine and stir. You can easily tell if the lees are stinky in any way. In my opinion, sweet lees are beneficial to the wine.

I think too many people are hung up on doing numerous rackings and think of all lees as something nasty and unclean. I think this is true of Gross lees only - those which contain pieces of pulp or stems and yes, gross lees should be avoided.

I transfer my wine in carboy to barrel in the spring - which is about 6 months after fermentation ends. I rack the wine off the lees before putting in barrel. After sitting in the basement over winter, the wine will throw considerable tartrates (depending on variety - with my Cabernet Franc always throwing the most). In other words, I put clean wine in barrel in which most of the tartrates have precipitated out because of being in a cool cellar environment.

This results in wine that precipitates little or no tartrates in barrel and therefore my wine is exposed to oak and not crusty tartrate crystals lining the barrel. I think you get a lot more mileage out of your barrels this way.

When I bottle, after being in barrel about a year, I bottle directly from barrel and do not care if there is perhaps a slight amount of sediment on the bottom. Hey, that is what punts are for on bottles. I have never noticed a problem with sediment in my bottled wine.

Everyone has their own methods but this is mine.

Reply to
Paul E. Lehmann

racking:

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Well, it's all relative to what you're working with - are you doing white or red wine, kit or fresh grapes, or fruit? The procedures can differ significantly based on that. The transfer from primary to secondary, for example, is mostly relevant to kit/juice winemaking when your primary is an open container. In that case you want to move the wine while it's still fermenting into a closed container. This being a juice fermentation, I wouldn't personally worry about the lees this early and just transfer the whole thing because as Jack said there is a danger of the ferment sticking if most of the yeast is sitting at the bottom of the container.

The EC Krauss instructions sound again like they're meant for a kit and not for general winemaking - notice they mention bottling within

4-6 weeks and give a large range for the final sg (up to 0.998), I've only seen parameters like that before in kit instructions. So you have to take that context into account.

Finally, if you think about large scale winemaking of say fruity, light-bodied whites, these would typically be full fermented in closed stainless steel tanks and only then racked, so there is no secondary fermenter vessel involved and the wine is in contact with all the yeast lees until it's racked. So that would also speak to there being no danger in transferring all yeast lees from primary to a secondary fermenter, if you employ that step in your kit/juice winemaking.

Pp

Reply to
pp

I had a several email exchange with Jack some time ago on this topick when I had a couple of batchs stick. He suggested at the time that when you are making a low solids wine from pure filtered juice such as Welch's grape concentrate, most of the yeast will settle to the bottome toward the end of primary fermentation. If you carefully rack off the leas and leave all of them behind you may end up with too few yeast to carry on an active ferment and the yeast, which is not reproducing at this stage, may die off before finishing ending in a stuck ferment. He never seemed to suggest this when you are fermenting on pulp from fruit which yield gross leas.

I do not mean to put words in Jacks mouth but that is basically what I took from his suggestions.

Ray

Reply to
Ray Calvert

I would agree in general with everything said so far on this but it's actually more complicated than this; but still very simple.

In general, if your fermentation vessel is not closed or poorly sealed, once the wine is close to done fermenting you risk oxidation.

Transfer of that wine is always recommended, especially if it's white. Bring everything over, it doesn't matter if it's from juice, grapes, honey or fruit wine. Get it under airlock now and keep it that way. Don't top up yet. That way you are assured you will remove all of the oxygen when the fermentation completes. That is the safest way to remove the risk of oxidation.

Once it stops bubbling; check the gravity over a few days and see if it's still dropping. (A better test is Clinitest; see if the Residual Sugar is 0.2% or less. If so, it's done and now you let it settle and rack; never transfer again.

If you are fermenting in sealed containers a transfer will not be needed, just racking.

I agreed with everything said about timing; time is not important, sediment is. Gross lees are a bit dangerous. The lees from an initial ferment may decompose if left alone. Gross lees can be a problem, you need to either remove them or check the wine very regularly, as in every few days if you feel a need to leave the wine on them.

Fine lees on the other hand, stirred, can impart a 'butteriness' to the wine and that can be nice in a Chardonnay or good Chenin, it's a little odd in a Riesling. It's not often done in reds, but a mediocre Pinot may be made more interesting this way. If you want to leave wine on the gross lees, you need to stir it and check it. Once that first rack removes the gross lees, the fine lees are not quite as problematic in my experience.

Joe

Reply to
Joe Sallustio

I've seen this several times lately about lees aging not being used with reds apart from maybe Pinot and am wondering what's the reference and rationale for that? As a counterexample, a bunch of people from our winemaking club were on a holiday in Italy a year or two ago and among other things, visited a winery whose Merlot got over 95 points from Parker. Seeing they were winemakers, the owner gave them a several hours long tour of his operation. To get back to the question, he ages his wines in barrels on fine lees and rotates the barrels regularly without opening them, mixing the lees into wine that way.

Also, since reds as a rule are aged longer than whites and go through ML, the conditions would seem to be well suited for lees contact so I'm curious why it would not be recommended?

Thx,

Pp

Reply to
pp

The steps in wine making are not a bunch of independent processes that can be mixed and matched like tinker toys. Each step that goes into winemaking must match all the rest of the steps. You cannot simply develope a process that makes a decent wine and then say, "Oh, if I add extended leas contact I will get better wine because soo-and-so uses it and gets better wine." It may work for you and it may not. It depends on the rest of the steps in the process you use. If you want to get the kind of wine someone else gets you cannot just pick a step out of his process and add it to your process and expect it to give you what he got. You must use his entire process. That step may make a worse wine when added to your process. You can experiment with changing your process and you should. But don't gamble your entire years production on a new step.

Anyway, that is my take on it.

Ray

Reply to
Ray Calvert

Ray:

I agree with that up to a point, that being that to develop a process that works for me there is by necessity some experimentation involved. I think it's ok to borrow and try things and see how they work and then adjust the process accordingly. But yes, it's definitely dangerous to make big process changes for the whole year production, I wouldn't recommend that.

However, back to my original question - I wasn't saying we should all do extended lees aging on reds from now on, I was asking for some references why we shouldn't, so I could read up some more about it to make a more informed decision. I don't recall a specific discussion of this in any of my wine books and am curious because I don't see why it would be problematic for red wines.

Pp

Reply to
pp

Pp, presumably you already considered that it might be due to some extract of the grape skins that remains in the lees? I speak from a lay perspective, I just figured that that is perhaps one of the main differences between whites and reds and so could be of relevance?

Jim

Reply to
jim

I'd encourage experimenting on a portion of the batch with extended lees contact, splitting out a gallon or two into jugs when racking from primary. That way you can get some idea as to whether you'd want to incorporate this process variant into the larger batch the following year.

I have been very happy with sur lies aging on some of my zinfandel. It is not as fruity as the one racked off the fine lees, but it does add a depth to the wine that I enjoy, at least with the D254 yeast I used. I haven't tried sur lies aging zinfandel with other yeasts yet.

I agree with Ray that you may have to experiment with various combinations of cold soak, yeast selection, yeast inoculation method, fermentation temperature profile, (with reds) skin contact time, and lees contact time in order to come up with a combination you like. It took me two years and six 1-gallon batches to 'develop' my preferred combination.

One nice thing about this being a hobby is the freedom to experiment.

Gene

Ray Calvert wrote:

Reply to
gene

I don't know that I have ever heard aging on the lees as 'not recommended' for reds; I can't see it as a bad idea if you don't want fruit forward results. I don't think it's a common practice though. That Italian winemaker certainly likes the idea and it works well for him. I think this is something like adding stalks in with your grapes on a red. There are lots of ways to make wine and you kind of have to try something to decide if it's for you or not. Green stalks are usually considered bad; brown stalks on the other hand are sometimes used. Henri Jayer uses stalks in his Burgundy but he tastes them first.

It may be the same with the lees. Leaving wine on gross lees is a bad idea, leaving it on fine lees may be great as long as you get those gross lees out of there. I think some of this comes down to 'don't mess with success'. I only experiment with things when I'm not very happy with the current state of affairs. I may try leaving one on the lees someday. I'm sure I will screw up a racking at some point and unintentionally do this anyway; now i just need to track the results.

Joe

Reply to
Joe Sallustio

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