Every few weeks, Markus hooks up a canister of Nitrogen to a keg of extra Syrah and goes to work topping up each of our 220 barrels of aging Borra wines. A long hose equipped with a special nozzle make the job much easier than the old “watering cans.”
If we were to leave a barrel completely alone, eventually enough wine would evaporate through the microscopic pores in the barrel walls to create a pocket of air under the bung. Air leads to the growth of the bacteria that like to make vinegar, and we’re not currently in that business.
An automatic humidifier sprays a mist of water into the barrel room every few minutes or so to maintain just the right amount of moisture. Too much humidity leads to mold growth and greater loss of alcohol, whereas too little humidity results in water loss from wine, rather than alcohol.
In any case, it’s always amazing how much wine we lose to the “angels.”
We’ve got both the 2008 and 2009 vintages of red wines in the barrel room, with some to be bottled at the end of this month. Markus can have them all topped and the barrels polished with a sulfur solution in only a couple of hours.
The whites are almost always bottled fresh from the vintage in March of each year. So we don’t have a problem turning white wines a blush color via a topping boo boo.
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