Some experience · 23.0 litres · Orange wine
Skin-contact Pinot Gris
A white grape fermented like a red, on its skins for a month. Comes out amber and tannic, and the tannin makes it far more robust than any normal white, which is why the style survived for eight thousand years in Georgia.
Starting sugar
22.3 Brix
5.61 kg of fermentable sugar
Original gravity
1.093
from the ingredients, not asserted
Finishing gravity
0.995
dry
Alcohol
12.9%
Brix alone predicts 12.3 to 13.4%
Residual sugar
0 g/L
approximate, from gravity
Ready after
6 months
best around 3 years
Made to Orange wine, and every computed figure lands inside the published range for it.
ABV inTA inpH inRS inWhat decides this wine
Keeping the cap wet. A white must has no colour to warn you when the skins dry out, and a dry cap on an orange wine grows acetobacter and mould as readily as it does on a red. Punch down twice a day for the whole month.
What goes in
| Ingredient | Weight | Sugar | Volume | Share of sugar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pinot Gris22.5 Brix The grey-pink skins are what make this variety worth doing this way; a neutral white grape gives a dull orange wine. | 34.00 kg | 5.61 kg | 22.78 L | 100% |
The ingredients contribute 22.8 litres and the water makes up the rest to 23 litres. Those figures are checked against each other when the site is built, because a recipe whose volumes do not add up produces a wine weaker or stronger than every number above.
Acid and sulphite
Acidity of the must
6.0 g/L
at pH 3.40
After malolactic
4.0 g/L
malolactic takes roughly 2 g/L with it
Tartaric to add
35 g
to reach 5.5 g/L. Bench trial before treating the batch
Sulphite at bottling
1.4 g
potassium metabisulphite, for 34 mg/L free SO2 at pH 3.55
The batch
- Must volume
- 23 L
- Ferment at
- 20-26 C
- Molecular SO2 target
- 0.6 mg/L
- Malolactic
- Yes
- Yeast
- D47to 15%, medium N
The sulphite figure is worked out against the pH of the finished wine, not of the must. Malolactic and deacidification both raise pH, and dosing a finished red to its must pH under-protects it by roughly a third. Recompute for your own reading.
Method
- 01Destem and crush. Do not press: the skins stay in.
- 02Sulphite lightly at 30 mg/L and pitch.
- 03Ferment on the skins at 20 to 26C, punching down twice a day.
- 04Leave it on the skins for three to four weeks after dryness, keeping the vessel sealed under CO2.
- 05Press, settle, and put it through malolactic.
- 06Bulk age six months. It does not need fining: the tannin drops the haze on its own.
The two instruments this recipe needs
Every number on this page came from a hydrometer reading and a pH reading. Without those two you are following a recipe rather than making a wine, and the sulphite figure in particular is meaningless without a pH you have actually measured.
Measuring
Hydrometer and trial jar
SOLIGT Triple Scale Hydrometer and Glass Test Jar for Wine, Beer, Mead & Cider - ABV, Brix and Gravity Test Kit
$18.98
Tracks the ferment from must to dry. The gap between your starting and finishing gravity is the only reliable way to know the alcohol you actually made.
Measuring
pH meter
Apera Instruments AI1113 pH Calibration Buffer Solution Kit (7.00, 4.00), 8 oz. Each
$18.00
The most important instrument on this page. pH decides how much of your sulphite is actually protecting the wine, and dosing without knowing it is guesswork.