Learn
How wine is made, in outline
The whole process from picked fruit to sealed bottle in one page, before the detail — so the individual steps have somewhere to fit when you read them.
The short answer
Pick the grapes, crush them, let yeast turn the sugar into alcohol, decide how long the juice sits with the skins, then choose a vessel to age it in and when to bottle it. Every wine style is a different set of answers to those questions.
Overview
Grow the grapes. Everything downstream depends on this, and a winemaker cannot add quality that the fruit does not have.
Pick them. When to pick trades sugar and ripeness against acidity, and it is the year's biggest decision.
Get the juice out. For white wine, press first and ferment the clear juice. For red, ferment with the skins and press afterwards.
Ferment. Yeast turns sugar into alcohol. Temperature, vessel and yeast strain all shape the result.
Mature. Steel keeps it fresh and fruity; oak adds flavour and lets in a little oxygen; time on the lees, meaning the spent yeast left over from fermentation, adds texture.
Blend, clarify, stabilise, bottle. Then, for some wines, wait years.
Where you can see it
- The decision that makes it red
- Fermenting on the skins. Take them away first and the same black grapes make a white wine.
- The decision that makes it sparkle
- A second fermentation in a sealed container, so the carbon dioxide has nowhere to go.
Go shallower or deeper
The beginner page and the chemistry page are both correct, and neither substitutes for the other.
Sources
Sources consulted
- WSET educational materials and the Systematic Approach to Tasting — Wine & Spirit Education Trust