2009 Sangiovese Rosé Bottled Today

Finally got around to bottling the 2009 Sangiovese rosé today. It's paler than last year and a quick taste suggests it's lighter on the palate as well. We'll see tonight. I plan to open a bottle with dinner. I sulfited the wine very lightly (to about 38ppm--three Campden tablets in a five-gallon carboy). The vessel threw a crusty deposit, as usual, which made racking the wine easy (for some reason, this wine always deposits a hard layer of tartaric acid crystals on top of the more easily disturbed sediment). Now it's time to design a new label.

[Update:] Opened a bottle with dinner tonight. Made a lemon prawn pasta (lots of butter and garlic) and a side of fingerling potatoes with broccoli and shiitake in a simple sauce of butter and soy sauce. Very relieved to find the wine is lighter, cleaner, and more delicate than it has been in the past, but not at all without character. Good length and depth of flavor. Perhaps the best I've made so far. The long, cool fermentation appears to have helped. I was a bit apprehensive when bottling the wine as it looked quite pale--paler than I expected it to be, but it has turned out to be very tasty indeed. "Opened a bottle" is a bit odd, I suppose. I just pulled out the cork I had pushed in a few hours earlier. Probably should have left one bottle uncorked.... Anyway, cheers!