Vintage 2020: Barbera Racking

On November 21, 2020, I blogged about Vintage 2020: Our Barbera is Wine. The last line of that blog was: Our next step is to rack the Barbera and squeeze the wine from the grapes and put it into a stainless steel keg for a bit of aging.
The problem we had was one of logistics. How do we get our Barbera which we fermented in a food grade Rubbermaid trash container into a stainless steel keg.
On December 1, 2020 with the logistical challenge partially worked out we decided that it was time to rack the Barbera into a stainless steel keg. The impetus that shifted our inertia was when we discovered that the mash bags that we purchased to separate the wine from the grapes fit perfectly onto the stainless steel transfer tank. (A little side note about mash bags: We have used mash bags as a substitute for a press. Our first time we used it was in 2015 when we pressed our first harvest of Chenin Blanc.)

We envisioned that once the grapes were put into the mash bags, the wine would flow effortlessly into the stainless steel transfer tank. Not so. Some of the wine did accommodate us and flowed into the tank but the mash bag full of grapes had to be shifted to allow the juice to flow into the 15-gallon keg. Fortunately, we had food grade plastic bins nearby so that we could take the grape filled mash bags out of the stainless steel tank so that the wine could flow into the keg.

This process took approximately 90 minutes. Part of the time was dedicated to squeezing the mash bags to get all of the juice out of the Barbera. Fortunately, I had gloves on but my husband used his bare hands which resulted in him having purple hands for at least 2 days. After 90 minutes we were done! We did manage to glean all of the wine that were in the bottoms of the various bins that we used and it filled a 300 mL dessert bottle that we had nearby. My husband will dispute this but I think that we left at least one gallon of juice in the Barbera grapes. On December 4, we inoculated the Barbera with VP41 to begin the malolactic fermentation.
On December 6, it rained all day so my husband spent the better part of the day making a lamb ragu. He also made the pasta for the ragu as well. (I know, I am a lucky girl!)

To pair with the lamb ragu, my husband brought out a 2018 Mati Barbera d'Asti and our Barbera that we had put into the dessert bottle. A side-by-side comparison of the wines in glass showed that we had good color on our wine (our Barbera is in the glass to your right.) Our wine had some nice blackberry flavors but also packed an acidic punch at the end. We hope that some of the acidity will mellow out with the malolactic fermentation.