Grape Gossip, How to Make Wine - The Science Behind the Art

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I would love to make wine, although in reality I think I’m attracted to the romantic idea of making wine, the arty side of creating something that gives so much pleasure (well hopefully it would be a pleasurable experience) to its end user. I like the idea of mooching through vineyards looking pensive and casual, tending to my grapes. In reality winemaking is hard work… and the actual winemaking process is really rather scientific and meticulous. A careful balance of control versus natural expression & development.

I asked my friend Graham what the reality of making wine is like (some of you may know Graham otherwise known as ‘Fino Man’) he’s made wine from the last couple of vintages, his response certainly didn’t live up to my romantic image, “It’s just all about cleaning, you make a mess then you have to clean it up”

So what are the basics? – and believe me I can only scratch the surface here

Wine making differs slightly depending on what style of wine you’re making, whether it’s white, red or rose, dry, sweet sparkling and so on.

The first step is to have good grapes – without this making good wine is going to be tricky. You can make poor wine out of good grapes but it’s a real task to make good wine out of poor grapes. When to pick is a key decision, it’s critical to have enough sugar to achieve potential alcohol levels but this needs to be balanced with sufficient acidity. So in cooler climates it can be difficult to get high enough levels of sugar whereas in warmer climates the problems are reversed and acidity can be tricky. So good grapes are the critical starting point, after this the process can slightly differ depending on what end style you’re looking to make.

So for white wine basics as follows:

Pick your grapes - Grapes are crushed to break skins – Stalks are removed – Crushed grapes are pressed and skins removed – Then transferred to a fermentation vessel (this may be stainless steel or oak) – Juice is fermented & there is no contact with skins – Wines are matured – then bottled.

For reds it’s slightly different obviously the colour is an indicator! If you peel a black grape apart from the odd few exceptions, the juice (contained in the pulp) is colourless – To achieve the colour in red wines the skins are left in contact with the juice:

Pick your grapes – Crush (and often destalk) – Transfer to a fermentation vat – yes the skins are still there – After a while they float to the surface of the thick mass and thus impart less colour, so to keep them in contact with the mass techniques are employed such as ‘pumping over’ - a man or lady will stand for quite some time holding a large tube that pumps wine from the bottom of the vat onto the top, breaking the ‘crust’. Now I’ve tried and believe me it’s rather heavy and gave me severe arm ache, I’ve also tried using a paddle type of instrument but again this gave me severe arm ache (although I do have weedy arms) Traditionally people just used to get in the vat and trample around but the high levels of carbon dioxide given off during the fermentation process can make this an extremely dangerous exercise! – Once fermentation has finished the free run juice is drawn off and the remaining grape skins are pressed producing the press wine. The free run juice is superior and may or may not be blended with the press juice – wine is blended then put into barrels for maturation.

And roses:
Basically there are 3 ways of making rose wine

Press the black grapes directly, ferment the juice (as in white wine) This is what’s known as a Vin Gris
Mini version of red winemaking, crush grapes then skins are left in contact with the juice for a shorter time thus producing a lighter colour.
Grapes are destalked but not crushed, put into a vat for 12 - 24 hours, juice is then run off and fermented without any skin contact
Maturation: This will depend on the time of wine being made and not all wines will undergo this process. Different vessels give different characteristics to the wine for instance small new oak barrels will have a more marked effect than a large old oak cask. Unfortunately people can cheat to achieve a similar effect to oak ageing, ie adding oak chips to the grapes as a quicker and cheaper alternative to casks!

Before bottling a wine may be fined and filtered to remove any dead particles left, it is generally believed that the gentler the filtration the better it is for the wine and many winemakers , when making dry wines, prefer to bottle their wine unfiltered. In the beautiful words of a friend of mine who has just bottled his first vintage “This wine hasn’t been fined, filtered or faffed about with, which means that it will throw a slight sediment – so just keep your teeth together when you get to the very last drop of the very last glass!!”



So there you go, making wine in a nutshell now we can all enjoy drinking it.