Hi,
I have always bottled the wine with the wine from the top of the source
bottle.
Just the other day I thought that if I first remove the stuff on the
bottom, that the whole might benifit, and the result would be less
cloudy.
Has anyone tried to first rack the bottom lees out before the rest of
the wine? and if so, how did it go?

Sean

I accidently racked some of the wine lees into my filter setup.
Clouded up everything and ruined the filters.

You can rack off the wine into another carboy/bucket, then bottle from
that. That goes fairly fast tho it may leave a significant amount of
liquid in the other container. Should you count that as dreg bottles
and fill up a few magnums, chill'em and let them sit, then decant off
the wine and drink within a week.

At least, that's what we do.

With the filter setup I'm very careful to either rack off the fining
material/lees to another demijon or to very carefully lower the racking
cane as I go. I can drop the cane in and let it siphon out all the
material around it to a junk bottle, then as the wine clears in the
hose I hook it back up to the pump- that works well too.

With the reds it's nearly impossible to see where the sediment is
because they're so dark, so this procedure really only works for
whites.

Jason

Sean Cleary wrote:
> Hi,
> I have always bottled the wine with the wine from the top of the source
> bottle.
> Just the other day I thought that if I first remove the stuff on the
> bottom, that the whole might benifit, and the result would be less
> cloudy.
> Has anyone tried to first rack the bottom lees out before the rest of
> the wine? and if so, how did it go?
>
> Sean

Thank you for what to do with the lees. Wonderful idea. I usually just
tossed them.
But I do not think you understood what I said. I ment to deliberately
remove the lee liquid first, by siphoning off the bottom, hopefully w/o
distirbing the rest of the wine. This is in alternative to either
accidentally racking wine with the lees, or to removing the non lee
liquid with a hope that the lees will not be disturbed. This second
hope is usually only partially correct: the lees will be disturbed by
either suction/siphoning or by tipping the carboy over and removing the
top liquid.

Sean


wrote:
> I accidently racked some of the wine lees into my filter setup.
> Clouded up everything and ruined the filters.
>
> You can rack off the wine into another carboy/bucket, then bottle from
> that. That goes fairly fast tho it may leave a significant amount of
> liquid in the other container. Should you count that as dreg bottles
> and fill up a few magnums, chill'em and let them sit, then decant off
> the wine and drink within a week.
>
> At least, that's what we do.
>

"Sean Cleary" > wrote in message
oups.com...
> Hi,
> I have always bottled the wine with the wine from the top of the source
> bottle.
> Just the other day I thought that if I first remove the stuff on the
> bottom, that the whole might benifit, and the result would be less
> cloudy.
> Has anyone tried to first rack the bottom lees out before the rest of
> the wine? and if so, how did it go?

Forget it. That doesn't work.

Tom S

> Forget it. That doesn't work.

I agree with Tom, I can't see how you would not stir things up and just
have to start over. Racking has been practiced the same way for
centuries, maybe millenniums. You would be vacuuming up the lees in
effect and I can't imagine that working. That said, you won't ruin it
so try it if you want to.

They do make a conical fermenter for wine that hangs on a wall. It has
a large ball and cone shape with a valve on the bottom to let the lees
go into a ball shaped compartment. I guess you can pull off the ball
once you collect the lees, maybe you shake them into the ball like when
you riddle sparkling wine. (I'm doing all of this from memory, it
seemed expensive and too much like work compared to carboys, besides,
where would I put several?)

Joe