Racking Off the Gross Lees

At the end of our fermentation we consolidated our newly made wine from the two kegs that we had it in during fermentation into one keg. My husband purchased all of the equipment, nitrogen gas, regulator, racking wand, etc.
Since the pH, titratable acidity and sulfur dioxide values were very similar in the two kegs, we felt that we could combine it without unduly affecting any of the parameters. We let the wine settle in the one keg. What we hoped to accomplish with this step was to settle out the yeast that were floating around in the fermentation.
We left the tank in the refrigerator from Friday, October 23 until Tuesday, October 27 to allow the yeast and other large particles of fermentation to settle out of solution. We used the same setup with nitrogen gas to rack over just the clarified wine. It was a tricky little maneuver because we only had visual cues to guide us in determining when to stop racking. We think we did a pretty good job. When we went to empty what remained in the bottom of the fermentation tank, we decanted over some pretty gross lees, shown at the left in the photo and we took out about 10 mL of wine in order to do more tests, including a sensory (i.e. tasting) test.

Unfortunately, I messed up the titratable acidity test, but our sensory exam leads us to believe that our wine is still searingly acidic.