Time to rack the Muller-thurgau and barolo.  Unfortunately, I got a little overzealous with the stirring of the elderflower tea bags in the MT, and punctured most of them.  Now there are cute little flowers floating all over the wine.  This became a problem as I was racking, the flowers were small enough to be carried through the racking cane, and eventually started clogging it up.  I stopped the flow and wrapped cheesecloth around the bottom of the racking cane and secured it with a sanitized rubber band.  That worked!  But, I still have a few flowers carried over, so I put a note on top of the carboy so I don’t transfer them over at the next racking, too.  I’m getting pretty good at racking apparently, I very often end up with 6 gallons-plus in volume after the first transfer.  I ended up with about 600 mL overflow, which I put into a 1 L bottle to add at the next racking.

The Barolo racking was more straightforward, nothing unusual to report.  The stabilizing/clearing agents were also added and the wine was “stirred vigorously” with my drill-driven wine whip.  The overflow was added in, and I actually need to top a little more, so I popped a bottle of 2006 Blackstone merlot to use to top it up.  It’s a very decent under-$10 merlot that I bought just for topping up my wines this season.  Now I’ll let the wine sit a little longer than the instructions say, I’ll probably do a few extra rackings before bottling in 6 months or more.