Francesco Spadafora's blog

Sulfur dioxide: it is actually possible to use less
Sulfur dioxide: it is actually possible to use less

A couple of years ago I received a phone call from our salesperson at that time, from a big island south of Sicily, because a customer of him was complaining about the typical day-after headache,after drinking one of our wines.
This person was asking me to check the levels of sulfur dioxide since, in his opinion this was the main cause of his customer’s problem.
At that point, I asked the person working with me in the lab to test the wine and make the analysis once again and we found out that the total sulfur dioxide was 39 on a maximum of 120 allowed for a bio white wine.
Subsequently I directly and personally contacted this customer, and he told me that he was with a friend, eating, drinking and chatting from aperitif to midnight circa.
When I asked how many bottles they opened the answer was SIX.
I’m telling you this to help you understand our relationship with sulfur dioxide, the most important element for wine preservation and the most controversial one.
Used for its important anti-oxidant, anti-septic and preservative properties, it is very important for the health and duration of the wines, but if misused or abused can be harmful for heath. And that’s why the Eu law put some limits to it, 210 mg/l for the white and rosé and 160 mg/l for the red wines, limits that can be raised during particularly hard vintages.
By numbers the WHO defined max dose per day in 0,7 mg/kg and lethal if 1,5 mg/kg.
Being able to properly dose sulfur dioxide is a complex process depending on many different things, like a natural vocation for ‘green’, the selection of grapes in the vineyard, so we can harvest healthy bunches only (by hand - no machines please) ad a clean environment in general.
We will publish our analysis on the website, close to the technical sheet, because we believe that people should be allowed to verify our efforts to keep them healthy.
And, for the headache issue...just keep an eye on the NUMBER of bottles.


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