How much loss from barrel aging.

[Rocktop]

Exciting day, today I picked up my new to me oak barrel, a Saint Martin - Grande Reserve from a semi-local winery. It is a 2015, not sure how many vintages through it before me.
I am making my plans for the fall and ordering my grapes to make a CS heavy bordeaux blend.
How much extra wine should I plan to make to have enough to fill the 225l barrel and top it up for around 12 months? I have been measuring basement humidity since march and it averages out at 53.7%.

Thank you,

RT

 

[Johnd]

Exciting day, today I picked up my new to me oak barrel, a Saint Martin - Grande Reserve from a semi-local winery. It is a 2015, not sure how many vintages through it before me.
I am making my plans for the fall and ordering my grapes to make a CS heavy bordeaux blend.
How much extra wine should I plan to make to have enough to fill the 225l barrel and top it up for around 12 months? I have been measuring basement humidity since march and it averages out at 53.7%.

Thank you,

RT

One case per year is what I figure, and I just retired a 225 L St. Martin. Your humidity levels are a bit low, which could affect the angels share, you might want to set aside 18 bottles for topping. Whatever you don’t use can be mixed into the barrel wine and bottled, so there’s no waste by reserving too much.

 

[NorCal]

I plan on 65 gallons for a 60 gallon barrel. Post MLF I will bottle anything left over from the racking and use that for topping or backfilling if I do a spring racking. Net after racking is around a case and a half, so pretty spot on to what @Johnd said.

 

[BarrelMonkey]

Congratulations on the new barrel! I'm sure you would know to do this, but if it hasn't been used in a while it will soak up a lot, so be prepared to rehydrate it (with water) for a few days before filling it with wine. Otherwise I agree with @Johnd and @NorCal; if you plan on topping monthly, expect to add up to ~1/3 gallon each time, so ~3-4 gallons for the year. A lot depends on your cellar conditions. Higher temperatures will mean more evaporative loss, but so will low humidity.

 

[Rocktop]

Ok excellent, that is exactly what I needed.
BarrelMonkey you hit on my second question which I think I know the answer too, but I'll ask anyways...
The barrel was recently, drained, and dried and sulphured, I assume with burning sulphur stick and then bunged.

My intent was to leave it as is, until a week or so before I needed it before filling and going through the process to prepare for use. Does this sound reasonable, or instead fill now and seal and then keep stored with k-meta solution until early winter when MLF will be done? Its basically a neutral barrel so I am not worried about losing oakiness life.

Thank you,

RT

 

[BarrelMonkey]

My intent was to leave it as is, until a week or so before I needed it before filling and going through the process to prepare for use. Does this sound reasonable, or instead fill now and seal and then keep stored with k-meta solution until early winter when MLF will be done?

As long as it smells good inside and you're keeping it in a cool dry place (your basement?) I would have no qualms leaving it empty until early winter. However, why don't you do MLF in the barrel? Once your primary fermentation is dry (or almost) I would barrel down, wait a month or so for things to quieten down (literally - no faint popping sounds when you put your ear to the bung hole), then pitch your ML culture. Of course, depending on what your barrel was previously used for there may be a population of ML bacteria in the wood already, just waiting for some wine...

 

[Rocktop]

Thank you BarrelMonkey, is there any benefit to mlf in the barrel? I was just assuming to do that in glass to make sure mlf had finished. As I recall my merlot and cab sauv ripened far enough apart that I would need to ferment them separately and then blend at barreling time. I guess I could mlf the Merlot (ripe first) in glass and then combine with the cab sauv in barrel and let the merlot kick off mlf for the remainder.
I made a 6 gallon batch of petit Verdot in 2020 so I will use some of it for this fall’s blend.

I was going to do a heavy kmeta soak of the barrel before re-use would that not kill any existing mlf bacteria left in the barrel?

Last question…. I assume you would want to rack off the lees after mlf done? With one barrel, would rack into brutes, flush barrel and back in?

Sorry for lots of question, big jump into using barrels.
RT

 

[BarrelMonkey]

I don't know that it matters if you do MLF in glass or barrel: as far as I'm aware, the only way to know if MLF is done is to test for malic acid, so you can do that with either a barrel of glass sample. I think you'd want to wait for primary fermentation to be complete before doing ML for either wine, so as long as you still have an active culture in the merlot I don't see why you couldn't use that as a 'starter' for the cab.

Kmeta should kill off cultures in the barrel, but wood is porous and there may still be some survivors in there somewhere. I wouldn't worry about it.

Assuming you rack from your primary into glass and then into barrel, you'll only have some fine lees in the barrel. Some winemakers leave this in on purpose and even stir it up - batonnage is the term of art. See Sur lie & bâtonnage (lees contact and stirring) @ Improved Winemaking for some more details.