What in the HELL is that smell??? (AKA First Rack 2012)

Wow, pretty much my first two years of making wine (this will be the 6th year of having grapes and the third year making wine) were cake walks apparently.  I had no diseases in my little vineyard, my harvests were OK, the vines were doing well, the fermentations were fast and painless and I had wine.  My ML kept getting stuck about half way, but that was about it.

This year...fuhgeddaboudit.

I ended up with powdery mildew that I detected in August, which meant late spraying with sulfur (sulphur?) which meant sulfur on the grapes.  This explains the two week fermentation, which bordered on stuck, and of course I didn't pick up on that either and didn't bother to give any yeast food.

Cut to last Saturday when I do first racking of the newly minted wine off of the gross lees...and this year, gross doesn't mean "large", it means "smelly and disgusting" because I now have some wonderful H2S buildup and our baby 2012 Pinot reeks like an old, cracked egg that after about a month has turned green.  YUK!!

Of course, I go into panic mode thinking the wine is ruined.  Luckily my wine mentor Chris Wills talks me off the ledge and suggests the simple step of "splash racking", which basically means gustily and with gurgling, pour the wine from one container to another allowing it to get all aerated and foamy.  Elemental sulfur is apparently quite unstable and doesn't like oxygen, and at this early stage, better to risk a little oxidation to the wine than allowing that H2S to turn into other, more ugly and harder to dislodge Volatile Reduced Sulfur (VRS) compounds that will stick around and at best make the wine barely drinkable, and at worst require it be poured down the drain.

I'm happy to report that after several vigorous splash rackings, the nascent 2012 vintage seems to be recovering and no longer smells like an old hen's butt.  Let me tell you...holding up a 5 gallon glass carboy and pouring into another 6 gallon glass carboy makes your arms sore after you do it a couple of times.

Now I'll have to follow all those rules about spraying the vineyard early, being careful not to spray much past June to ensure that this doesn't happen again, giving the 2013 some yeast food and keeping it a little warm.

This isn't quite the cake walk I thought it was.  But I learn as I go.  Who knows...in 20 years I may be good at this.

Thanks Chris for all your help!  You've been great over the years as I figure all this out.