Moving into oak barrels…

I spent yesterday at the winery moving my wine from the fermentation tanks into oak barrels.

The basic process is divided into a couple of steps – press wine and free-run wine.

For the press wine:
- Skim off the floating cap of grapes skins
- Place these into the small wine press – filling the press
- Inflate the internal bladder, lightly pressing the skins
- Catch the run-off in a bucket and pump this into a segregated barrel

For free-run wine:
- Place the “torpedo” into the wine – this is a long stainless steel filter/screen that reaches the bottom of the fermentation tank. It prevents stray skins from being pumped into the barrels.
- Insert the pump feed hose inside this filter
- Insert the filling valve into the selected barrel
- Pump the wine from the tank and into the barrel, being careful to not overfill.
- Move to the next barrel and continue until the wine has been transferred.

Based on expected juice yield rates, I expected to get around 3.5 barrels of wine. However, I have good news. Even though we didn’t press the skins very hard, I got 4.5 barrels of wine. This is excellent news. This means there will be more wine available for you and your friends; this is a difference of 25 cases!