Today was a game of wine shuffling.  My hubby commented I’m playing Towers of Hanoi with the wines.  Here’s what I have to do:  I have 2 carboys of the syrah, and Paul needs those carboys back, so I need to move them into 5-gallon better bottles.  The only 5-gallon better bottles I have are currently holding the overflow merlot, so I need to move that into a 6-gallon better bottle plus some smaller bottles.  On top of that, Paul is bringing back about a gallon of overflow merlot from the “rescued” wine that I pulled off of our combined sludge, and that will need to be moved somewhere also.

So, I’m starting by racking off the merlot I already have at home.  It’s time to check the MLF, and happily it’s done!  I’ll add some sulfite and 3 ounces of heavy toast french oak cubes to the 6-gallon bottle., and a half ounce of oak and a pinch of sulfite to 2 one-gallon bottles.

When I went over to the office winery to pull of any recovered petite sirah from the pooled sludge, I was greeted by a swarm of fruit flies!  Needless to say, they had made a very happy home in our bucket o’ sludge, so I left it alone and will let Dave dump it out (he loves cleaning out the buckets!).  I grabbed the extra merlot and headed back home to add it to the rest, and also took a little of the petite sirah from the barrel that had been freshly inoculated with VP41 malolactic bacteria.  I’ll pour that into the syrah and hope *maybe* that will get the MLF going.  I’ll also put the bottles out in the garage to try to warm it up during the day.

After all of that wine shuffling, I still need to put the foils on the barolo and merlot that was bottled last weekend.  Happily, none of the corks seem to be leaking.  The Mosti Mondiale barolo kit came with corks and foils (as well as labels, but I made those myself), so I used those for finishing off the bottles.  It really sets those apart, plus then I will remember that this is the mega-expensive kit wine when I open them in a few years.  Hopefully it will be worth it!