Saturday went well. My shoulder held. The ullage preventer works perfectly, as advertised. What a neat device. If it was not for that we would not have been able to use this last barrel.
You insert it into the partially filled barrel then inflate the bag inside the barrel by pouring in water through a reservoir that sits on top. The bag is allowed to inflate as a second tube coming out the barrel allows air to escape as the bag fills with water. When wine begins to fill this tube you know air has been eliminated from the barrel head. You then clamp off the tube (which doubles as a tasting tube) and Bob's your Uncle.
Due to our method, this wine is our "second" or lower quality wine. It is what we'd drink while we wait for the good stuff to get better. However, it's good, but it has a slight off smell that I hope will now go with this last racking. With the better wine, the smell went a racking ago, so it shows you how "behind" this "second" wine is. It will catch up though, so no worries.
We had Daniella over for the weekend. She was encouraged to suck on the siphon to decant the wine from demijon to barrel, but we've no photos of her. You can see siphoning in the top left pic above. Most guests get roped in during their visit. We have a few dodgy pics of them too - probably not wise to abuse friendships by publishing them here though.
Actually we do have DVDs of all our winemaking efforts over the years, which we love to bore people with. A lot of fun. Plenty of dodgy pics again, but this time set to music.
Our current Anthem has to be "Plowboy" (I'd prefer "PloughBoy") by Cledus T. Judd. Very inspirational.
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