Wine 101: Racking the wine turns into a hacking

A few articles back, I explained our first attempt at winemaking. I left you at the stage where my wife and I had put the wine in gallon containers.

Our wine studies teacher, DiMaggio Washing-ton, offered to help us bottle the wine after Thanksgiving, after he learned we had racked the wine four times.

Racking is the process of siphoning off the clear juice from the sediment that has settled at the bottom of the container. Because we are amateur winemakers, we did this the old-fashioned way.

We took half-inch clear tubing and used duct tape to attach bamboo skewers, taped so the ends protruded about a half-inch below the tubing. In the container, the skewers touch the bottom first and keep the tubing above the sediment.

You also have to make sure you sterilize everything that comes in contact with the wine. For this, you use sulfur dioxide. You then siphon the juice from one container to the next.

The day it was to be racked for the last time, my wife had scheduled a hair appointment. I told her I would rack off the wine and pick her up and we would head to DiMaggio’s house.

I racked all five containers without incident and all that was left to do was clean up.

As I started to cut off the duct tape from the tubing, the scissors slipped and one end of them went into my left thumb and the other end cut off a button-size piece of the pad of my little finger.

True wine hobbyists will now appreciate my dilemma. I did not know if the wine would survive an eight-hour delay due to an emergency room visit. I did not want to hang up DiMaggio, and I knew that if my wife saw this, she would insist we go to the doctor.

I put the piece I’d cut off back on the wound and wrapped the finger with about 10 Band-aids.

When I picked up my wife, I hid the bandaged finger from her until we were close to DiMaggio’s house. I told her I might have to see a doctor the next day. We arrived with the wine, bottles and corks, and bottled the wine.

When we got home about seven hours after the scissor incident, my wife examined the injury and looked at me as if I were out of my mind.

We immediately left for a walk-in doctor’s office. I did not explain the winemaking story to the doctor, as I did not want to embarrass my wife any further.

The doctor did ask me if I had at least cleaned the cut-off portion, and without thinking I said yes, with sulfur dioxide.

Now I was getting the same looks from the doctor. They ended up putting me on antibiotics, and could not reattach the portion I cut off.

When I went to work the next day, my co-workers were amused, but knowing of my past experiences with projects at my house, they were more curious why Nancy had left me alone with a pair of scissors.

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