I am in need of a pump for my wine. I have recently added at 50 liter oak barrel to my cellar. I also have 20 liter barrel, three 54 liter demijohn and 6 each of five and six gallon carboys. I need a pump to transfer the wine from the demis to the oak and back again. Bottling would be a nice feature to have.
Vacuum pumps seem to be great for bottling but I am unsure how it would be for transferring to and from the demijohn and oak barrels.
A transfer pump does not seem to have the bottling feature. Any thoughts?
Vacuum racking establishes a vacuum in the target vessel, so you can vacuum rack out of a barrel into demi's or carboys, or use the attachment to bottle with no problem. See the All In One videos from @vacuumpumpman . When bottling, your bottles need to be higher than the wine you are drawing from.
The only issue I see with your goal, is racking into a barrel, which requires a vacuum in the barrel if you can't use gravity to siphon into the barrel. I do not know if you can create a vacuum in a barrel without drawing air in through the pores, but maybe someone else has done it and can chime in. It seems like it would be airtight enough to do it, but I do not know that for a fact.
Most of my transfers are with an auto-siphon using gravity, as I don't have any issues lifting 6 gallon carboys and barrels. When racking out of my big barrel, which I can't lift, I either vacuum rack to a carboy, or use my Buon Vino Super Jet to move wine uphill by simply bypassing the filter plates and just letting the pump do the work for me.
EDIT: Meant to add, if you don't have a filter / pump, you can get a pretty inexpensive pump from a marine supply store that is made to handle saltwater and should have not problems with wine, just need some clear tubing.