Wines I'm Making: 2010 Sangiovese Rosé Bottling (Second Batch)

Yesterday I bottled the second batch of 2010 rosé I made from our Sangiovese grapes. This second batch was something of an experiment, but, apparently, an at least moderately successful one. The summer of 2010 was very cool, but punctuated by a couple of intense heat spells that ruined a lot of grapes (many growers pulled leaves to increase sun exposure, hoping to encourage what had been very slow ripening caused by the otherwise cool weather, only to see their crop then hit by sudden heat that destroyed the exposed berries). The fruit that survived the short hot spells often ripened poorly. Our Sangiovese, a case in point, came in with very low sugar and less-than-optimally developed flavors.

I made rosé from the grapes using my usual method (about 19 hours on the skins), and that produced a pleasant, but very light wine that lacks the interest of the excellent, flavorful rosé I made with our 2009 grapes. As usual, I hated to throw away the pressed skins from the initial batch, which seemed to have a great deal of pulp and juice still attached. I therefore tried a second-run fermentation. That is, I added water and sugar back into the pressings to ferment a second wine--not expecting much success from it (I've made some dismal red wine this way). I left the mixture to soak for more than two days, partly because I wasn't especially interested in it, but that proved to be a good thing. This second-run wine that I've just bottled (and sampled for the first time) is quite acceptable--better than I'd hoped for. Having said that, it's not great. I think the lesson here is not that making second-run wine (which seems like cheating) is a good thing, but rather that in very lean years, like 2010, it pays to give rosé a much longer maceration than would normally be appropriate. Having said that, I'm not going to sneeze at the additional 25 bottles of wine my experiment yielded.