Much of the success of the wine's ageing process in barrel depends on the quality of the rackings. Each racking is in fact exactly like a decanting. It is performed regularly and enables the wine to acquire a remarkable brightness, a « brilliance » which renders any type of filtration needless.

During their two years of barrel ageing, red wines undergo on average seven or eight rackings, one every three months in the first year, and one every four during the second. The process consists in separating as precisely as possible the clear wine from the lees which have settled at the bottom during the previous months. Care must obviously be taken not to unsettle this deposit, so the use of a pump is not possible. We therefore always rack with the traditional « soufflet » or bellows, now in the form of a small compressor, which provides sufficient air pressure to « push » the wine delicately from one barrel into another. Once the greater part of the wine has been racked from the barrel in this way, the real process of decanting begins. Two cellar workers are required to perform this task. While the first one gently tilts the barrel like an old bottle as it is delicately poured, the other checks, with the aid of a candle, the clarity of the wine as it runs from the barrel. As soon as it becomes « rouge » (!), i.e. almost imperceptibly cloudy, the operation is finished.

What can be more traditional than racking ? In the semi-darkness of the cellar, the light of a candle shines gently on the still face of a man whose eyes are fixed on a thin trickle of wine running from a barrel held in position by two arms that seem to have appeared suddenly from the shadows. This scene could have been painted by Georges de la Tour in the 17th century, and yet the age-old technique of racking is every bit a part of the present time as any other.

There are trends in today's wine-making world that reject, sometimes a little unwisely, the filtration of wines, which is precisely what traditional rackings allow us to avoid.