Straightforward · 23.0 litres · Pale dry rose
Pale dry rose
Four hours on the skins and then made exactly like a white. The colour is a decision made in a single afternoon, and it is very easy to overshoot it.
Starting sugar
23.1 Brix
5.84 kg of fermentable sugar
Original gravity
1.097
from the ingredients, not asserted
Finishing gravity
0.995
dry
Alcohol
13.4%
Brix alone predicts 12.7 to 13.9%
Residual sugar
0 g/L
approximate, from gravity
Ready after
3 months
best around 2 years
Made to Pale dry rose, and every computed figure lands inside the published range for it.
ABV inTA inpH inRS inWhat decides this wine
Watching the clock. Colour extraction is fast and accelerating: at three hours it is onion skin, at eight it is strawberry, and by the next morning you have made a light red. Draw a sample every hour and press when it looks right in a glass, not in the bin.
What goes in
| Ingredient | Weight | Sugar | Volume | Share of sugar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grenache23.0 Brix (picked off the midpoint) Picked earlier than you would for a red. A rose at 15% alcohol is a failure of planning rather than of technique. | 22.00 kg | 3.77 kg | 14.96 L | 65% |
| Cinsault22.5 Brix (picked off the midpoint) | 12.00 kg | 2.07 kg | 8.40 L | 35% |
The ingredients contribute 23.4 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
6.5 g/L
at pH 3.25
No malolactic
6.5 g/L
the acidity you measure is the acidity you keep
Potassium bicarbonate
13 g
to reach 6.0 g/L. Bench trial before treating the batch
Sulphite at bottling
1.0 g
potassium metabisulphite, for 26 mg/L free SO2 at pH 3.30
The batch
- Must volume
- 23 L
- Ferment at
- 14-17 C
- Molecular SO2 target
- 0.8 mg/L
- Malolactic
- No
- Yeast
- VIN 13to 17%, high 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 both varieties together. Chill the must to 10C.
- 02Leave on the skins for three to six hours, checking the colour in a wine glass every hour.
- 03Press gently and sulphite the juice at 50 mg/L.
- 04Settle cold overnight, rack, and ferment at 14 to 17C.
- 05Cold stabilise, filter if you can, and bottle in the spring.
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.