How Is Wine Made?

While you can find lots of information on the web about various types of wine, there isn’t very much information about how it is made. Wine making is both an art and a science, and owning a vineyard can be rewarding or a risky business.

Wine is basically fermented fruit juice. While it can be made from any type of fruit, including apples, peaches, pineapples and other varieties of fruit, most wine is made from grapes. Fermentation adds a variety of flavors and traits to fruit juice that can transform it into something very enjoyable if things go right with the process, or something very distasteful if things go wrong.

No one alive knows exactly how wine was discovered, but one tale says it was discovered when a distraught Persian princess tried to kill herself by eating rotten grapes. But rather than dying, the outcome was much more pleasant. There are also a number of stories about people noticing strange behavior in birds and other animals who feasted on overly ripe grapes. Needless to say, the history of wine-making stretches back thousands of years.

Wine can be very difficult to reproduce consistently. That’s because there are numerous variables in the process, including the types of grapes used, the soil they are grown in, the weather conditions, the harvest time and the fermentation process. Due to so many variables in the process, even the best vineyards can have a difficult time trying to produce consistent results. That why you may hear reference to something like “2004 being a very good year” for a particular wine maker, while the following year may not receive the same accolades.

Climate can be the most important an most unpredictable factor in producing a good wine. The proper amounts of rain and sunshine, as well as good temperatures are extremely important. To produce good wine, the grapes must be perfectly ripe with just the right sugar-acid balance. Once the grapes reach that point, they must be harvested immediately.

Some grapes are harvested with machinery, while others are hand-picked by experts who can identify the best grapes at their peak of ripeness. Once picked, they must be rushed to the winery for processing, otherwise they will start to oxidize or ferment.

As grapes reach the winery, they are crushed and stems removed. In many cases, the skins and seeds are left with the crushed grapes. The skins from red grapes are what give wine its color. The longer the skins, seeds and pulp are included with the fermentation process, the deeper the color becomes and the more flavor is passed to the wine. If the skins are immediately removed and excluded from the process, even a red grape can produce white wine, as is the case with some White Zinfandels that are made using red grapes.

The fermentation process is next. The crushed and processed grapes are poured into vats. Some vineyards allow a natural fermentation process to occur, while other use special cultured yeasts to help the process along. The fermentation process can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks or months, depending upon the wine-making process used and variables such as temperature.

After fermentation, some wines are aged in large oak barrels, while others are aged in bottles. Some wines are blended with wines from other grapes, or from earlier vintages. Aging wine in oak barrels ads adds complex flavors–such as vanilla, caramel or spice–and tends to make the wine taste smoother. Whether the aging process takes place in bottles or barrels, the process can takes weeks, months or sometimes years. This is a delicate trial-and-error process, because a wine can be aged too long and it can lose some of its desirable characteristics.

Success or failure with wine making can be either financially rewarding or devastating. As wine lovers, we need to understand and appreciate the efforts that go into producing the wines that we enjoy. A large part of wine making is still an art, because the process is not and may never be automated. There will always be a strong human element in producing fine wine.