Racking question

You can use juice, but that will prolong fermentation and clearing. Ideally you use a similar wine, or rack into a smaller carboy.

If you add juice you are adding sugar and the yeast may kick back in and then you are right back at the beginning. You could stabilize to prevent this but then adding juice will sweeten your wine. If you want to sweeten it, great. You also have the problem that you will be adding pectin and other stuff that you may have already got rid of and your wine could go cloudy again.

The best way to rack is to avoid having to top up anymore than mandatory. Always rack into smaller carboys which means you need a variety of sizes and a bunch of 1 gallon and 1/2 gallon sizes.

Ray

Why rack into smaller carboys? Why not just have the same size catboy with less wine in them?

Too much air will cause oxidation. I found that out with my Pinot Grigio. My first wine.

mdg> Why rack into smaller carboys? Why not just have the same size catboy

When you're wine shopping, pick up a few 1.5L bottles of wine, or sometimes you can find "jug wine" in intermediate sizes between 1.5L and 5 gallons. Those make nice containers for "topping off" wine.

If you're working with red grapes, here's what I often do. Buy enough juice or grapes to make 6 gallons of wine. When you do the press, fill a 5 gallon carboy with the free-run wine and any press wine needed to make up the 5 gallons. Then, fill the 1 gallon carboy (wine jug) separately with the press wine. Fit both with an airlock and allow both to separately go through the secondary fermentation.

When you rack at the end of the secondary fermentation, top off with the press wine, and then rack the rest of the press wine into smaller containers (1 or more 1.5L wine bottles, for example). For remaining rackings, top off the 5 gallon carboy from the smaller containers of the press wine, and then either top off the smaller containers with distilled water or just discard the remaining press wine (and by discard, that could mean drink it of course :o). This assumes that the press wine isn't so tannic that you don't want to blend it back in with the free-run wine.

The easiest option, as already mentioned, is to just top off with a bottle of a similar wine (maybe from last year's winemaking).

Finally, you can sterilize some marbles, and add those to the carboy until the level of the wine reaches well up into the neck of the carboy (that's what you want to aim for to avoid excessive oxidation of the wine). Each time you rack, though, you'll need more marbles. You can sterilize the marbles by boiling them in water for 5 minutes.

Jon [Check out my winemaking homepage

By racking into smaller containers you can fill all but the last container so they do not have to be topped. The last container, being smaller will not require as much topping. For instance, I go from a 6 to a 5 and a 1 or a 5 and a 1/2. To go from a 5 I will use 4 one's and a 1/2 or mix a 3 in if I have one available. If you have a little left over -- put it in the fridge and drink it young. You know, Nuevo wine.

Ray

Another alternative is after you rack add clean sanitized glass marbles to the carboy to raise the volume. This way you add nothing else to the wine.

I santize using Iodophore.

Frank Homebrewer Eastern NC

I actually did that. Well, not exactly. Couldn't find marbles, so I went to the pet section and got pure glass aquarium decorations stones.

My chard> Another alternative is after you rack add clean sanitized glass marbles to

Another option is to use some type of gas to replace the air in your carboy. I don't think that this is the most popular method. I've opted to use Argon because its a noble gas (dont mix with other gasses) and is heavier than air. So it stays in the carboy pretty well. It's a little more expensive than nitrogen or CO2 but you won't need that much. Assuming you are'nt making wine on an industrial scale you'll only need one of those small 20cubic foot bottles and a flow regulator. With a little online shopping I was able to get setup for about $125. It only costs about $10 for 20CF of Argon. 20CF of gas is about 150 gallons of space, that's a lot of headspace. It can be confusing on how much gas it takes to fill the headspace that you have. The trick is to find a flow rate that gives you a gallon of gas in one minuite and set your regulator to that setting. Then for every gallon of space that you want to displace you purge for that many minuites. The main reason why I like this method is that I don't have to keep so many different size carboys. I don't have a lot of wine from previous years so filling up to the neck of the carboys don't work for me either. I was too scared to use marbles or anyting like that due to the risk of sanitation issues. Here's a link to a useful sight to find how to set your regulator. Be careful you know what units your regulator uses to measures flow is.

That is simply not correct. Argon mixes perfectly well with other gases. Earth's atmosphere is about 1% argon. If argon didn't mix with other gases it would settle to the bottom of the atmosphere we'd all suffocate from lack of oxygen! So much for the so-called "blanketing" effect of heavier gases.

Argon is called a "noble" gas is because it is not chemically reactive. It's the same reason that gold is called a noble metal.

That is a recipe for microbial spoilage. It is not possible to completely purge a gallon e.g. of headspace with _exactly_ one gallon of argon because the gases mix somewhat during the purging, so some of the argon you direct into the headspace gets carried out with the air. Depending on your technique, it takes approximately _seven_ gallons of gas to adequately purge a one gallon headspace.

I myself sometimes use argon and nitrogen to purge headspace - but not for long term storage or in a vessel that I can't seal completely airtight. Even so, I make sure to maintain adequate free SO2 in the wine.

The main

The sanitation issue with marbles is highly exaggerated. Rinsing them with warm water is sufficient unless they have visible crud clinging to their surface. Glass is extremely easy to clean and maintain.

Tom S

Has anyone ever used glass or acrylic "rods" instead of marbles?They would be easy to insert and different lengths would give the proper displacement.

Glass rods would be fine. Acrylic? Might be fine too, but I don't know.

Tom S

The rods would cost you more that another carboy or a few 1 gallon jugs . G

You need to top that with anything, don't wait until you rack again. Unless you are talking about less than an inch of headspace it's just not a good idea to leave a lot of surface area in wine, especially a white. You really are better off minimizing contact with air as much as practical in addition to proper SO2 levels.

Joe