Take what I say as my opinion as it may not match the suggestions of some of those above.
First -- There is no such word as "immediate" in wine making. Drop it from your vocabulary.
What you are describing is certainly gross leas. You will not get 2 inches of fine leas. When you press your fruit some of the meat will pulverize and come through as very tiny particles the stay in suspension as long as fermentation is keeping things stirred up. But you do not have to get the wine off of it immediately. It has been in your wine ever since you started the fermentation and a few weeks more will not hurt anything. If 2 inches have dropped out in a day or so, then there is a lot more that will drop out. If you rack in every day or every few days as more drops out you will loose a lot of wine. Every time you rack you will loose 1-2 inch or so as you need to stop above the sediment.
Leave it alone for 2 or 3 weeks so most of it will drop out. Then get rid of most of the "gross" sediment with one racking and you can let the fine leas that drop out after that set in the wine for another 2 or 3 months. Then when you do your second racking you will be rid of virtually all the sediment and you can start worrying about clearing the wine of particulates that are not settling out that cause cloudiness if there is a problem.
It is true that if you leave the gross leas for several months you can have a problem with H2S. But a few weeks or up to a month is not going to cause a problem. You don't want to end up doing 4 or 5 or more racking, each of which looses wine, when you do not have to.
Riddling RacksOn 5-30-2006 4:33 PM, pp Matthew, I've riddled using the method Pp outlines. The carton the bottles came in works fine as a riddling rack. I'd add that a good shaking prior to the complete...
Ray
