Peach wine - racking and topping up thoughts?

[lilvixen]

I have three 1-gallon jugs of peach wine in secondary. I used pectic enzyme and bentonite, which left a ton of sediment in the primary bucket. I should have tried to get more liquid during racking, but live and learn. I checked the jugs last night and noticed there's a decent layer of sediment in each jug. I'll probably rack this weekend or next, but I don't have anything for topping.

For batch consistency, I'll be combining everything into the primary bucket and re-distributing to the 1-gallon jugs.

Thoughts/experience/opinions please:

1. How long can/should I leave the jugs in secondary to let the lees compact more?

2. Can I pour the jugs over cheesecloth to get all possible liquid off the lees? Should I use a racking cane down to the sediment first, and then pour the remaining liquid over cheesecloth to reduce oxygen exposure? Should I add kmeta to the jug before racking?

3. I used two cans of white grape/peach concentrate, so I have some grape in the recipe, so topping up with a commercial white wine with peach in the description may work, yea? I have never had peach wine, so I doubt I'd notice if the flavor changed a bit.

I've considered glass marbles, but I think it would take too many. Likewise, racking to jugs smaller than 1-gallon, when it's just enough shy a gallon to be obnoxious seems like more work than topping up with commercial wine.

Thanks!

 

[Scooter68]

Just went through about the same thing with 4 gallons of peach wine (From 28 llbs of De-Stoned peaches.)
Did about what you are talking about. About a week after end of secondary, I racked all 4 carboys into a clean fermentation bucket and covered it with an airlock while then used:
1) Stainless steel strainer on the lees, putting the strained liquid into a single carboy (1/2) gallon.
2) Then used a plastic filter on that strained liquid to put it into another 1/2 gallon carboy.
3) At that point I went ahead and racked the 'clear must' from the fermentation bucket into 3 x 1gal carboys and a 1/2 gallon carboy. (Could have done that immediately after the racking too but didn't this time.
4) During the use of the plastic filter I had a lot of 'liquid' left and I put that into a 1/2 gallon carboy for one more filtering with muslin cloth filters.
5) In the end I wound up with 2 smaller containers which I have put into the fridge thinking that I might use them to top off the 3 x 1 gallon and the 1/2 carboy after the next racking in about another 10 days.

Biggest concern I have is the exposure to air during all that filtering. That's one reason I went ahead and put the 'clear must' into the 3 x 1 gallon and the 1/2 carboy before finishing my filtering.
Here some images of the Peach aging, the course lees settled and the filtered liquid from the lees.

 

[salcoco]

the amount of air added during your process is no more than added by commercial wineries in there filtering process. should not worry.just make sure you add k-meta at end of process. k-meta is a oxygen scavenger as well as a bacterial inhibitor. works great use powder form better control. dosage is 1/4 tsp per 5 gallons.