Winery Work is 90% Cleaning!

One thing that we learned at Jonathan Edwards when we made our wine there was that 90% of winery work is cleaning! We are learning that quickly as we try to set up our own process for making wine and racking wine.
In order to ferment the 2024 Auxerrois and Chardonnay juice that we brought back from being pressed at Stonington Vineyards, we had to first clean some barrels for the Chardonnay and then move the 2023 Chenin Blanc finished wine from the tank into barrels and kegs to free up the tank for the 2024 Auxerrois.
The steps involved:

• Making up the cleaning solutions
• Finding and cleaning the barrels and kegs that we thought the wine would go into
• Setting up the pump and the transfer lines
• Cleaning the barrels, kegs and lines

The above process is complicated in our space because we don't have drains in the floor. My husband devised a method by which we could work around this situation by contacting our Porta-Potty company who said that they would come to pump out the waste matter from an IBC tank that we would fill.
On October 2, we tested our process by cleaning two stainless steel barrels and then transferring our Chardonnay into the cleaned barrels. That took the better part of the afternoon into the early evening!
The following day, the Chardonnay was inoculated and the fermentation was started. Confident in our method, we tackled the 160-gallon tank that we had our 2023 Chenin Blanc in. We first cleaned a barrel and several kegs and the transfer from the tank to the barrel and kegs went smoothly.
Next came the task of cleaning the tank. One complication was that although we put in on-demand pressurized hot water, (please see our blogpost: Industrail Space Upgrade), we did not have any hot water!
We carried on and after the wine transfer, this is what the inside of the tank looked like. My husband washed it out with cold water and since we had a tea kettle, we made numerous pots of boiling water. You can see the progress in these photos:

The entire process of cleaning the tank took one hour! We think that the tank could have been cleaned in at least half the time if we had running hot pressurized water. However, we were really happy with the result. Clean tank!