Another full day of wine racking and shuffling!  Dave sent me an email that the merlot barrel needed to be topped, so first I racked off the smaller bottles of merlot and took 2 cleared bottles to the office winery to top off the barrel.  I thought I had enough to top off and leave some for later topping, but in fact I used up all the extra wine I brought, it was just enough.

It was also time to check the MLF progression on the petite sirah.  Happily, it was complete!

I stirred some Kmeta into the barrel, and then it needed a decent amount of topping wine.  I decided it was a good idea to just pour the wine out of the carboy into the barrel.  It was going fine until my cell phone started buzzing in my pocket ….

Oops!!!

I packed the rest of the PS in carboys into the car to take home.  I thought I had them secured pretty well, but one popped cork on the ride.  Luckily though, no wine spilled out of any of them.

Once I got them home, I racked the wine off of the gross lees, stirred in Kmeta, and added french oak to the carboys.  The syrah also needed oak, so those carboys were racked and oak added to each bottle.  The shower is full again — and I didn’t even rack all of the merlot or any of the primitivo!