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Winemaking
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From harvest to bottle, with side paths for sweet, fortified, sparkling and skin-contact wine.
New to wine 135 min 22 steps About How Wine Is Made: From Grape to Glass
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How Wine Is Made: From Grape to Glass
Start with the whole arc: harvesting, crushing, fermenting, then maturing and clarifying the wine before bottling, with red and white splitting at fermentation.
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Harvest Timing & Ripeness Assessment Philosophy
Start at the vineyard: deciding when to pick means weighing sugar, acid and phenolic ripeness.
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Go deeper: Sweet wine, 16 steps, 119 min
Leave grapes on the vine longer, or let noble rot or frost in, and the wine can end up sweet; take the sweet wine side path here.
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Sorting Tables: Hand Sorting vs. Optical Sorters
At the winery, sorting removes unripe, damaged or diseased grapes before crushing, either by hand on a sorting table or with an optical sorter.
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Free Run Juice vs. Press Wine: Quality and Character
Pressing: free-run wine drains away from the grape solids without pressing, while press wine is what a press then extracts from the skins, bringing more tannins and possibly more flavor.
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The core reaction: the OIV defines alcoholic fermentation as the transformation of grape sugars into ethanol, carbon dioxide and secondary products.
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A winemaker can also stop that reaction on purpose: chilling and filtering the yeast out leaves the grape's own sugar behind, without adding spirit.
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Go deeper: Fortified wine, 16 steps, 127 min
Add grape spirit before fermentation finishes and the yeast stops with sugar left behind; the fortified side path starts here.
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Commercial Yeast Inoculation: Selected Strains and Their Character
Choosing the yeast: cultured strains give a controlled, predictable fermentation in place of wild yeasts.
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Go deeper: Sparkling wine, 18 steps, 149 min
Take the sparkling side path for the four methods, traditional, tank, transfer and ancestral, and the regions that use them.
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Cold Soak / Cold Maceration (Pre-Fermentation Skin Contact for Color & Aroma)
For reds, a cold soak holds the crushed grapes at a low temperature before fermentation starts, typically at 5 to 10°C according to the AWRI, so color, aroma and flavor compounds are extracted while no alcohol is present.
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Go deeper: Skin contact, 13 steps, 98 min
White grapes can take skin contact too; the skin contact side path follows orange and amber wine.
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After alcoholic fermentation, bacteria convert sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid and raise the pH.
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Malolactic Fermentation vs No Malolactic
Compare the two outcomes side by side: round and textured with malolactic, crisp without it.
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Barrel Fermentation (Chardonnay, Sémillon, Whites)
Oak can enter at fermentation: top white Burgundy villages ferment Chardonnay in French oak barrels.
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Then oak aging, where barrels add wood-derived flavors and expose the wine to gentle oxidation.
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Set oak against stainless steel, an inert vessel that adds no flavour and can be airtight.
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Leaving wine on its lees, the dead yeast cells left after fermentation, builds texture, as in Muscadet and Champagne.
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Clarifying: fining agents bind proteins, tannins and other particles so they settle out.
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Filtration Types: Coarse, Fine & Sterile/Membrane
Filtration finishes the job, from coarse depth filters to sterile membranes.
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Close at the bottle: screw caps, technical corks, synthetic closures and glass stoppers, and what cork taint and oxygen transmission mean for each.
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Close at the bottling line: the oxygen a wine picks up during bottling has a significant impact on how it develops, before closures make the final decision.
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