How it's made
From vine to glass
Every wine is the result of a sequence of decisions, and most of them are invisible on the label. This is the map of those decisions — start with the kind of wine you are asking about.
The steps on these pages describe the common route, not a required one. Real production varies enormously: producers skip stages, reorder them, apply them to part of a batch, and combine approaches. A step-by-step page is a model of a process, not a description of what happened in any particular bottle.
By colour
The first fork in every production decision is what happens to the skins, and that is what decides the colour.
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How red wine is made
Fermenting grape juice in contact with the skins, which is where colour and tannin come from.
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How white wine is made
Pressing the juice off the skins before fermentation, then fermenting the clear juice.
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How rosé is made
Brief contact between juice and black grape skins — not by mixing red and white wine.
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How orange wine is made
White grapes treated like red ones — and one of the oldest methods in wine, not a modern invention.
Sparkling
Three routes to bubbles, producing genuinely different wines. None of them is a cheaper version of another.
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The traditional method
A second fermentation inside the bottle, followed by ageing on the dead yeast.
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The tank method (Charmat)
A second fermentation in a pressurised tank, preserving fresh fruit instead of developing bready complexity.
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The ancestral method
Bottling wine before its first fermentation finishes, so a single ferment produces the bubbles.
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The transfer method
Second fermentation in bottle, then emptying all the bottles into a tank to filter — used mainly for very large and very small formats.
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How Champagne is made
The traditional method as practised in Champagne, with its own blending and ageing conventions.
Sweet
Sugar is either concentrated in the grape before fermentation, or left behind when fermentation is stopped. Those are different wines.
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How sweet wine is made
Five different routes to leaving sugar in the glass — stopping fermentation, drying the grapes, freezing them, botrytis, and simply adding sweetness back.
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Noble rot
A fungus that concentrates grapes and adds its own honeyed character — in exactly the right weather.
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Late harvest and passerillage
Leaving grapes on the vine to shrivel, concentrating them without rot.
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Ice wine
Pressing grapes while frozen, so the ice stays behind and only concentrated juice comes out.
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Appassimento (drying grapes)
Drying grapes after picking to concentrate them — producing both Amarone and sweet passito.
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Arrested fermentation
Stopping fermentation early to leave natural sugar in the wine.
Fortified
"Fortified wine" is not one production style. When the spirit goes in, and what happens afterwards, differ completely.
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How Port is made
Fast extraction, then spirit added mid-fermentation to stop the yeast and keep the sugar.
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How sherry is made
Fortified after fermentation, then aged either under flor or in contact with air.
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How Madeira is made
Fortified and then deliberately heated, producing a wine that is effectively indestructible.
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Fortification
Adding grape spirit — and when you add it determines whether the wine is sweet or dry.
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Flor: the living film on Sherry
A layer of yeast that grows across the surface of the wine, protects it from air, and changes it completely.
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The solera system
Fractional blending across tiers of barrels, so no wine is of a single vintage.
What happens in between
The decisions that separate two wines from the same fruit — and which are invisible on a label.
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Maceration and extraction
Soaking skins in juice to extract colour, tannin and flavour — the main lever on a red wine's structure.
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Cap management
Skins float during red fermentation. What the winemaker does about that determines much of the wine.
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Malolactic conversion
Converting sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid — and the source of buttery Chardonnay.
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Lees ageing and bâtonnage
Leaving wine on its spent yeast to build texture and savoury complexity.
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Oak ageing
What barrels actually do — flavour, texture, and slow oxygen exposure.
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New oak and old oak
What changes with each use of a barrel — and what does not.
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Fermentation and maturation vessels
Steel, barrel, foudre, concrete, amphora, qvevri — what each actually does about oxygen, temperature and extraction.
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Blending
Combining components to make something better than any of them alone.
Finishing and bottling
Clarifying, stabilising and sealing — the least discussed and most consequential stage.
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Fining
Adding an agent that binds to unwanted particles so they can be removed together.
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Filtration
Physically straining wine to clarify or stabilise it, and the long argument about whether doing so strips character or merely strips haze.
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Stabilisation
Making sure the wine does not change unpredictably after bottling.
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Unfined and unfiltered
Two different decisions, frequently conflated, and neither of them a quality guarantee.
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Bottling and closures
The last step, and one that determines how the wine will age.
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Corks, screwcaps and closures
How a bottle is sealed, and why it is a genuine trade-off rather than a quality signal.
And the rest
Categories that do not fit the colour tree.
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How alcohol-free wine is made
Removing alcohol from finished wine — and why that is harder than it sounds.
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Carbonic maceration
Fermenting whole uncrushed grapes under carbon dioxide, producing very soft tannins and distinctive aromas.
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Qvevri and amphora
Fermenting and ageing in buried clay vessels — the Georgian tradition behind orange wine.
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What actually goes into wine
A neutral account of permitted additives and processing aids — what they are for, and why "chemicals in wine" is the wrong frame.
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Natural wine
What the term covers, where it has legal force and where it has none, and what it does not mean.
Everything else in winemaking
33 further topics.
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Fermentation
Yeast converting sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide — the step that makes wine wine.
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Native yeast or cultured yeast
Letting the resident population ferment, or adding a selected strain — what each actually changes, and what the evidence does and does not support.
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Natural, organic, biodynamic: what each word means
Seven terms that are routinely treated as synonyms and are not. A wine can be any combination of them.
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Single varietal or blend
Why so many of the world’s most admired wines are blends, and why varietal labelling is a marketing convention rather than a quality tier.
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Acidification and deacidification
Adjusting acidity up or down — why it is needed, and why the rules are the mirror image of chaptalisation.
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Adjusting the must
The family of interventions that change what the grapes delivered — enrichment, acidification, concentration — and where each is permitted.
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Barrel fermentation
Fermenting white wine in oak rather than steel, which integrates the oak more completely.
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Biological ageing and flor
Ageing wine beneath a living film of yeast, which protects it and transforms it.
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Chaptalisation
Adding sugar before fermentation to raise the alcohol — not to make the wine sweet.
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Dosage
The final addition that sets a sparkling wine’s sweetness — and why Brut is not the driest category.
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Extended maceration
Leaving the wine on its skins for weeks after fermentation has finished, and why that can soften rather than harden it.
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Extended skin contact
Fermenting white grapes on their skins for weeks or months, producing orange wine.
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French oak, American oak and the rest
Species and seasoning differ measurably. The tasting-note shorthand built on top of that difference does not hold up.
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Oxidative ageing
Deliberately exposing wine to air to develop nutty, dried-fruit complexity.
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Pressing
Extracting juice under pressure — before fermentation for white wine, after it for red.
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Riddling and disgorgement
Getting the sediment out of a bottle that is already under six atmospheres of pressure.
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Stainless steel and inert vessels
Fermenting in a vessel that contributes nothing, to preserve fruit and freshness.
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Stems: to include or remove
What retaining stems in a red fermentation actually contributes, and why ripeness of the stem matters more than the proportion.
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The four routes to rosé
Direct press, short maceration, saignée and blending — what each does to colour, structure and purpose.
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Vegan and vegetarian wine
Why wine is not automatically vegan, which fining agents are animal-derived, and what a label does and does not tell you.
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Whole-bunch fermentation
Including stems in the ferment, which adds structure, spice and aromatic lift.
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Yeast: cultured and ambient
Whether to add a selected yeast strain or let the grapes and cellar do it.
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Co-fermentation
Fermenting two varieties together rather than blending them afterwards.
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Cold soak (pre-fermentation maceration)
Holding crushed red grapes cold before fermentation starts, to extract in water rather than in alcohol.
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Concentration methods
Saignée, reverse osmosis, vacuum evaporation and cryoextraction — four ways of removing water, with different consequences.
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Direct pressing
Pressing black grapes immediately so almost no colour is extracted.
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Estufagem and canteiro
Deliberately heating Madeira, which is why it is effectively indestructible.
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Field blends and co-fermentation
Three things routinely confused: mixed plantings picked together, varieties fermented together, and wines blended after fermentation.
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Micro-oxygenation
Dosing tiny, controlled quantities of oxygen into a tank — developed for Tannat, and not the same as barrel ageing.
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Ripasso
Re-passing Valpolicella over Amarone skins to add body and dried-fruit character.
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Short skin contact
A few hours of skin contact, used to make rosé and to add aromatics to white wine.
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Stuck and sluggish fermentation
When yeast stop before the sugar runs out — why it happens, and why it is more dangerous than it sounds.
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Thermovinification and flash détente
Heating grapes to extract colour quickly — a technology behind a great deal of inexpensive red wine, and a tool for damaged fruit.