Winemaker Cary Gott discusses racking the 2009 vintage wines

This is the first of what I hope will be many updates straight from our winemaker Cary Gott. We’re trying something new: since Cary is a busy guy who rarely spends time writing at a desk, he recorded a voice memo on his iPhone, emailed it to me, and I have transcribed it. If you’d like to “hear” more from Cary, please take a moment to click on “Like” or comment. And please let us know if there are topics you’d like Cary to talk about in the future.
From Cary:
I’m going to be racking the ’09 Cabernets next week. So what we’re doing right now is I’ve got them [Bin to Bottle — where we custom crush our wine] set up to have the barrels down on Tuesday afternoon and we’re going to rack it on Wednesday. I’ll taste every barrel and make sure everything is fine. Once the wine’s in tank, we’ll take a big sample of it and send it off [to ETS laboratories] for full analysis plus Scorpion [test for wine spoilage microbes] and adjust the SO2 and then go back to barrel. So it’s a very gentle process. This will be the first racking for the ’09s.