From Juice - # of Rackings

[snoword]

I am making wine in 5 gallon batches from juice and want to know how often to rack, how much pot meta, and when to bottle.

This is what I have do so far:

1) Primary fermentation (juice came already balanced w/ pot meta) - Time in stage 5 days

2) Rack 1 (secondary fermentatino) into carboy and added nothing - Time in stage 5 weeks

3) Rack 2 into carboy and added oak chips & 1/4 tsp pot meta - Time in stage ????

Ok this is where I am stuck. Not sure how long to be in the 2nd Racking and the path to take from here to bottling.

Please help....

 

[Wine Maker]

As a general rule, after you transfer your wine from the primary fermenter you want to rack 7 -10 days later. The important thing is that you want to get your wine off the gross lees sooner rather than later. At the first racking add 1/4 tsp of potassium metabisulfite (50 ppm) for each 5 gallons. The second racking should be 2 months later where you rack the wine to remove much of the finer lees. Without getting all technical about free SO2, when you rack the 2nd time you can use less potassium metabisulfite, slightly less than 1/4 tsp (around 30 ppm).

As for bottling, you want to wait until the wine is clear, could be another 2 or 3 months (or sooner). Before bottling resulfite the wine, again at about 30 ppm. I like to wait a day after I sulfite before bottling.

Please note that if you are going to sweeten the wine you need to add potassium sorbate (1/2 tsp per gal) and potassium meta to prevent the new sugar from fermenting. Wait at least a week before bottling.

I got tired of weighing out and mixing the sulfite each time I needed it so now I make a 10% SO2 solution. If you are interested let me know and I'll give you the instructions and the conversion measurement for using a solution rather than the powder.