Straightforward · 23.0 litres · Medium-bodied dry red
Sangiovese
Sour cherry and dusty tannin over acidity high enough to cut through anything you eat with it. Extracts less colour than it seems to deserve, and chasing that with a longer maceration only adds tannin.
Starting sugar
23.4 Brix
5.91 kg of fermentable sugar
Original gravity
1.098
from the ingredients, not asserted
Finishing gravity
0.995
dry
Alcohol
13.6%
Brix alone predicts 12.9 to 14.0%
Residual sugar
0 g/L
approximate, from gravity
Ready after
9 months
best around 3 years
Made to Medium-bodied dry red, and every computed figure lands inside the published range for it.
ABV inTA inpH inRS inWhat decides this wine
Stopping. Sangiovese is pale by nature and the temptation is to macerate for three weeks to fix it. The colour does not come, and what you get instead is a wine that is hard for five years.
What goes in
| Ingredient | Weight | Sugar | Volume | Share of sugar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sangiovese23.0 Brix (picked off the midpoint) Picked at 23 rather than 24.5. Sangiovese past this point loses the sour-cherry lift that is the whole reason to grow it, and the alcohol climbs out of the style. | 35.00 kg | 5.91 kg | 23.45 L | 100% |
The ingredients contribute 23.5 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
7.0 g/L
at pH 3.45
After malolactic
5.0 g/L
malolactic takes roughly 2 g/L with it
Tartaric to add
23 g
to reach 6.0 g/L. Bench trial before treating the batch
Sulphite at bottling
1.3 g
potassium metabisulphite, for 31 mg/L free SO2 at pH 3.60
The batch
- Must volume
- 23 L
- Ferment at
- 24-28 C
- Molecular SO2 target
- 0.5 mg/L
- Malolactic
- Yes
- Yeast
- BM 4x4to 16%, 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, crush, sulphite at 50 mg/L, and take your readings.
- 02Pitch and ferment warm, punching down twice a day.
- 03Press after seven to nine days, at dryness. That is short for a red, on purpose.
- 04Malolactic through the winter, which also softens the acidity by a gram or two.
- 05Sulphite, rack, top up, and bulk age six months before bottling.
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.