Racking the 2005’s

This week we racked our 2005 wines. The process was started Monday and completed today.

For those that don’t know, racking is the process where the wines are pumped from barrel to tanks and then the barrels are cleaned out and sterilized with ozone removing all the dead yeast and other solids that have settled to the bottom of the barrel. The wine is then returned to the barrel.

In our short history at Match, we’ve been racking 3 or so times per vintage over the course of the 22-24 months the wine spends in the barrel. There’s no hard or fast rule… the winemaker decides when its needed based usually on smell. This was the first racking of our 2005’s.

On the farming front… Tomorrow we start pruning Butterdragon.