Zinfandel 1.0 Racking

This weekend I racked the Zinfandel since primary fermentation was pretty much done with, if not completely done. As must ferments what's happening is that yeast is going crazy eating all the sugar and converting it into alcohol. Eventually either the yeast creates too much alcohol for it to continue to survive or it runs out of sugar and starves. Either way the yeast dies off and settles out to the bottom in a layer of gunk called the lees. Racking is when you siphon the wine off of the lees. Gravity is on our side as dead yeast and other remaining gunk in the wine slowly (over a matter of months) settles to the bottom allowing us to siphon off the good wine on top. This process is known as racking. You generally want to rack your wine a number of times (with a number of weeks or even months between rackings) to eliminate as much dead yeast as possible which gives you a better tasting wine.

One thing that was kinda interesting during racking was in the measurements: the sugar % reading and the brix (which are really just different scale readings on the hydrometer) both came out negative. What does that mean? Other than the specific gravity is pretty low, I'm not totally sure really.

Racking measurements (8/31/08):

• Wine: 5 gallons
• Brix: ~ -1.5
• % Sugar: ~ -3.0

So to get the alcohol % you are supposed to subtract the initial sugar % measurement with the measurement after fermentation. So 12 minus -3 equals 15. So the wine should be about 15% alcohol or so. So if I hadn't added that extra sugar to the must at the start to raise the sugar % from 10 to 12 would I have a 13% alcohol wine instead? I'm starting to question the accuracy of my hydrometer, or maybe I should measure by the specific gravity scale and calculate from there? Regardless it was a change of 15% points on the scale so it should be about 15% alcohol which is all I'm trying to measure with the hydrometer anyway, right?

Other things of note:

This wine is my first 'large' (large being relative) batch, and I noticed it was much easier to accept that some wine at the bottom was just unrecoverable from the lees. The fact that I had already filled a 5 gallon jug with wine made it easier to let go, compared to the liter bottles I've been filling so far.

This wine tastes much better than the previous two, which I also racked. The cherry wine is still very sour and I may have to augment it by adding back some sugar to make it drinkable. The milk jug wine is decent/drinkable but nothing spectacular.

Can dead yeast and lees be used as a fertilizer? We will soon find out as I dumped them in the back of the yard/garden/over grown area.

The grapes on the vines in the back are starting to turn purple, but they're not very large at all and there aren't very many of them. I'm guessing I'd be lucky to get 6 ounces of juice total from the whole vine.