Wine Making From

10000 Feet

For some reason the art of winemaking seems to be very intimating to a lot of people; and it certainly was to me. Why is this? After all, wine is a just a beverage. Why do we get so tied up in knots over the myriad of technical terms involved with winemaking? Here we will skip most of all the technical aspects and view the simple steps from 10000 feet.

Vineyard

Grapes are grown in vineyards, with the obvious purpose of being used to produce wine. During the growing season, which runs from spring through the fall harvest time, the growers pay close attention to the grape crop. At this time, the vintner hopes that the weather will not reach extremes, and the summer will last, so the grapes become ripe.

The weather can cause the grapes grown in one year to be better than those grown in another. This is what people mean when they talk about the good vintages or the good wine year.

As the grapes grow they continually ripen. This means the amount of sugar is increasing. As the harvest time nears the winemaker and oenologist will pay close attention to the grape. If you happen to be visiting a vineyard during harvest time you might see them using an instrument called a refractometer. This is an instrument that shows the amount of sugar in the grape on any given day. The wineries want to get the sugar level of the grapes as high as possible when harvesting.

Picking the grapes

Once the growers or the winemaker decide that the grapes are ready, workers start picking the grapes. The idea is to pick the grapes in bunches, leaving behind any grapes that have spoiled. The crop is then taken to the winery. Depending if they are white or red grapes, two different processes take place.

White Wine Making

White wines can be made from grapes that are either white or red in color. This is because the color of the wine comes from the pigment in the skin and the winemaker removes the skin before the wine is made.

After the grapes are picked they are crushed and de-stemmed in a large machine. Then the juice, which at this point is called free-run juice, is drained off and collected. The stems and skins are pressed, so that additional juices can be drained off. Both the stems and skins are left behind.

Next, the juice along with some yeast goes into either a stainless steel vat or a small oak barrel to be fermented. Fermentation simply means that the yeast absorbs the sugar producing alcohol and carbon dioxide as by products. The carbon dioxide bubbles up and disappears, while the alcohol stays.

The juice, which is now termed "must", continues to ferment. This process takes anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks, until all the sugar has fermented into alcohol.

The yeast cells die, and are known as lees. This means that the winemakers left the dead yeast cells in the wine as it aged, instead of letting them settle to the bottom of the vat or barrel, draining off some of the clear juice, which is called racking. Sometimes they will stir up the lees to increase the content of the wine.

Either way the wine has to age. Most white wines are aged in stainless steel vats as apposed to barrels. This is because vats seem to let out their full flavor. The Chardonnay grape is sometimes aged in Oak.

After the aging process, the wine is racked and stabilized, then fined. This is a process in which a substance is added to attack any particles that are floating around. Next, the wine is drained off of the residue, and filtered to make it clear and bottled. The wine is either released into the market place or held at the winery to age longer.

Red Wine Making

Winemakers go through the same basic process to make red, but with some minor differences. The wine maker objective is to get a lot of color into the wine. That means when the grapes are crushed, the stems are removed but the skins are left. The skins contain most of the color pigments and tannins.

Unlike white wines, red wine is fermented before the skins are removed so the skins can stay in contact with the juice longer. In the production of simple and inexpensive wine, the skins may be discarded after fermentation. But in the case of fine wines, the winemaker will want to keep them in there longer. This is called maceration. The skins will have to be punched down into the wine, or the wine pumped up over the skin, to encourage this process.

Then the wine is racked and the juice is put into either oak barrels or stainless steel vats for aging. When the aging process is complete, the wine is fined, filtered, stabilized, and bottled.

Summary

So you see, no need to get nervous about winemaking as the process is reasonably straightforward. And for the winemakers, they are as proud as new parents when that first bottle is produced!

Contributor: Darlene Summers (Westchester, PA)

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