wine racking

[Dick Peterson]

You haven't told us how much sugar is left in your juice. You won't kill wine yeast off simply by pouring or racking the juice during fermentation. A sudden temperature change can shock it but the fermentation will start again if there's plenty of live yeast present and plenty of sugar present. But if you've fermented it nearly to dryness and then racked off most of the yeast (all the lees in the bottom of the carboy is mostly yeast), then your fermentation can get stuck. That's a common error of new winemakers. The other bad error is to store the carboy in a draft during fermentation. Taste it. If it's not very sweet, the best thing to do is to filter it very tightly, add about 35ppm of SO2, bottle and store cool. Begin drinking after about a month. It will never go completely dry.

If it's still quite sweet, then add new yeast and store at around 75 degrees without drafts blowing on the carboy. It'll start again and eventually go dry. Don't rack it so clean until the fermentation is really done. But keep air out. In fact, the only reason to rack at all during a fermentation would be if you started getting lots of H2S evolving from the fermentation. That would be unusual.