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Kian: Hello everybody out there! This is Kian again. And now, I wanted to kind of go over some of the side activities that happen here at the winery. As you can see, we do not have any activity as far as crushing is going on. We are in the middle of June, so at this point, we are what you would consider downtime so to speak, since there is no real harvest activity. But what happen at this point is other components in the wine making cycle particularly with red wines and one big one is racking.
Now, why would one rack their red wine particularly their Cabernets. Cabernets are young wines for the most part, have a lot of sediment that forms and settles to the bottom of the barrel over the course of time and every three to four months, we actually go through and separate the sediment from the wine, kind of a way of clarifying the wine during its aging. What it also helps to do is give the wine so much needed oxygen, because it does need to get out there and stretch its legs out so to speak.
Cabernet can become quite still, can be become quite close if you leave in the barrel for too long. It is unlike a Pino or a Cero that can be somewhat fragile and you do not want to take a part too much of the bright fruit components so you do not rack those wines as often. But with Cabernet, you do want to give the wine a good bit of variation for the first year or so.
And then as we move closer to bottling, 12 months, 14 months,16 months down the road, we tend to limit the oxygen pick up and do more of a anaerobic racking which we are going to show you today.
The racking that we are doing today actually is a racking to tank because we are getting ready to bottle this wine. This is actually Randy Cunningham’s 2006 To-Kalon and he is actually present here to oversee the racking with us. So, what we are going to do is we are going to have Connor hook it up and you can see the process of the racking.
What Connor has here is a bulldog pump system. It does not include a pump which is great because that means the wine gets gentle handling and what it does is there is nitrogen that is introduced into the barrel that pushes the wine out into the tank. These are variable capacity stainless steel tanks, the lid is already at the bottom of the tank, the tank has been spurge with argon so there is no oxygen in there and the wine is going to slowly go into the tank and push the lid up.
So, this is our stainless steel tanks that we are using as we are doing the racking particularly as we get ready for bottling. These are the tanks that we used for bottling and the lid that you see right here, it is actually at the bottom of the tank at the beginning of the racking and as the wine is going into the tank and filling it up, the lid raises up nice and slowly. Keeps the oxygen pick up at a minimum because we do spurge the tank with argon at the beginning so there is a very little oxygen pick up in the wine, which is imperative as you get ready for bottling.
So, as I was mentioning there is the two different rackings that we do, we do the aerative racking which we can do by gravity and that is where we bring the forklift, lift the barrels up and actually siphon the wine from one barrel to the receiving barrel. And the other type of racking is the racking by nitrogen which basically limits the oxygen pick up but again maintains that softness or that gentle handling of the wine.
Lot of our rackings for Cabernets is done barrel to barrel. What we have in our program here at Crushpad is a rotation program when it comes to barrel aging of Cabernets. And the Ceros for that matter, pretty much all are red wines and with the rotation program, a particular client’s wines starts in one type of barrel. And then as it gets going through each racking cycle, will then get transferred to another type of barrel whether its another new barrel or whether they want to go into a ones use or neutral depending on the amount of oak complexity they want in their wine.
So, as we are doing the racking, you notice that this unit right here, the bulldog pump, has a side
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