Put him on THE RACK!

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. But all jesting aside, THIS sort of racking, and THAT sort of racking do have one thing in common: they both separate one thing from something else, in the former case it is sediment from wine, while in the latter, it’s limbs from torso. Let’s stick to discussing the former meaning, shall we?

So as I said, the term “racking” refers to siphoning off wine from the sediments that inevitably settle in the bottom of barrels of aging wine, usually from one barrel into another, or from barrel to stainless steel tank, back to the original barrel (after the barrel has been cleaned of the unwanted sediments of course). This activity usually occurs for the first (and perhaps only) time just after fermentation and maceration (soaking the grape skins in the newly formed wine to extract color from the skins). Effecting racking just post fermentation/maceration is done primarily to separate the wine from the lees (a collective word that encompasses all of the large solids that fermentation causes, i.e. dead yeasts, bits of grape skin, seeds, etc.) There is however a second and third benefit to racking, namely the aerating effects that the process brings to the table which in the case of red wines, helps the finished-wine-in-training to set and retain a deeper color, as well a way to diminish the possibility of reduction (look toward the bottom of the page) and the odor problems that this flaw carries with it. With all of these benefits, it is no wonder that there are almost no wineries that do not do at least one racking.

In cooler winemaking climes, a second racking is frequently employed to remove tartrates (soildified and percipitated tannins) that cold northern (or deeply southern, south of the equator) cellars often bring about. Further, there are cellarmasters who perform one last racking as cellar temperatures rise in the spring into summer, this to prevent any off flavors that might develop as a result of the extra heat working on the particulate matter still present in the aging wine.

For the sake of clarity (no pun intended), there are wine makers that do very little racking, usually only the first round, and then go on to filter (oddly enough, with filters) and/or “fine” (a sort of specialized filtering that is done with particular substances like egg whites and eisenglas [a substance made from fish bladders]). The de-emphasis of any kind of racking/filtering/fining is most commonly encountered in the New World where greater density and concentration are more highly-prized characteristics than in Europe where the tendency is toward lighter, more nuanced wines. Winemakers that eschew fining and filtering believe that such invasive properties do a certain violence to the wine, and consequently efface winemaking and/or terroir subtleties. Those winemakers that hold to these tenets believe that multiple rackings confer all of the best aspects of fining/filtering without any of the drawbacks, PLUS things (like aeration) that fining and filtering cannot do at all. And so they rack on…

Racking is a process that has been utilized since the Middle Ages if not before, and it has become rightfully canonized into the plethora of techniques that 99% of modern winemakers use. Racking is such a direct and simple process, that it belies it’s great importance in winemaking…just like so many things in life, no?

TOM CIOCCO