Seufert Winery

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Wine Barrels Breathe…

It may seem obvious, but wood is porous. New barrels absorb wine, and all barrels loose wine to evaporation through pores in the barrel’s wooden staves.

This explains why we’re spending time topping barrels this time of year. Depending on the relative humidity, the wine level can drop and inch or two a week.

This in turn creates head space in the top of the barrel and exposes the wine to air. Air oxidizes wine and allows Acetobacter to start transforming wine to vinegar (in addition to other possible aerobic processes that harm wine). All of these things are undesirable, so air exposure must be minimized.

Five months into barrel aging our 2007 vintage, we’ve used about 4% of our red wine to top the remaining barrels. This usually involves racking wine out of a barrel into our special topping tank.

Picture a tall cylinder of nitrogen with a hose feeding the gas into a retrofitted 15 gallon stainless steel beer keg. Coming out of the keg is another hose carrying the wine. A nozzle lets us carefully fill each barrel. Nitrogen is used to prevent the wine from contacting air/oxygen, and we regulate its’ pressure to push the wine out of the keg.

We top our barrels every two weeks or so.

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