The Basics of Winemaking
Harvest 2023 is upon us! As the first grapes begin to flow into the wineries and your favorite wines begin their slow march towards your glass, I thought it might be a good time to explain the slight differences that make monumental impacts to how white, red, and rose wines are made.
Imagine it’s Sunday night and you’re preparing dinner. You went to the grocery store to get all the ingredients that the recipe called for, you’ve prepped everything, and, after reading three full pages about someone’s life altering interaction with a random person in a Target that led them to making the greatest baked chicken breast of all time, you are ready to begin. You follow the instructions to a T, you plate the food, you sit down at the table with excitement for that first bite, you take the bite, and it is the most bland and dry chicken you have ever experienced. Damn that random person in Target for inspiring someone to put this recipe on the internet!
The above scenario is probably what would happen if you took this blog and tried to make wine. What I describe here are the basics and if you follow them, you could end up making a great wine. However, most likely you’ll sit down excited for that first sip - swirl, sniff, sip - and there will be no slouching or sighing. Instead, you’ll damn me for putting this on the internet. This is because winemaking has numerous small variations and, just like an experienced chef in a kitchen, experienced winemakers know which situation calls for what variation. The chef would probably take that person’s chicken breast recipe and make the greatest meal of all time.
So, what happens when your grapes leave the vineyard and show up at the winery? First, you sort the grapes. A lot of material other than grapes can show up in the same bins, such as leaves, rotted or underripe grapes, or, even crazy things, like a snake. Then the grapes move to the de-stemmer and crusher. The names pretty much imply what takes place here. The grapes are removed from the stems and then the grapes are crushed to break the skin and release the first bit of juice. Up to this point white, red, and rose wines are treated the same.
The winemaking process (credit: Pintrest)
Here is where they begin to differentiate: after crushing the grapes, future white and rose wines get pressed. Pressing is the process of removing the juice from the solids (ie skins and seeds). For white wine, pressing of white grape varietals typically occur very shortly after crushing. This is because if the juice remains in contact with the skins, the juice will absorb anthocyanins and will turn orange. Orange wine is a big trend right now. Although it seems novel, there’s a good chance the first wine ever produced over 7,000 years ago was an orange wine. It’s simply the rose of white wines.
For future red wines, the juice is allowed to remain in contact with the skins so that it absorbs anthocyanins, which makes red wine red. How long it remains in contact with the skins is the winemaker’s decision, but eventually it will also be pressed off the skins. Rose is the middle road. You allow red grapes (really blue, purple, or black) to come into contact with the skins for a short amount of time before pressing, which gives the wine a more pink or light red color.
The process so far will provide you with grape juice, but it won’t be alcoholic. In order to become alcohol, you just need water and Jesus. But if you’re missing one or the other, you need sugar and yeast. The juice you received from crushing the grapes naturally contains all the sugar you need. The yeast can either be naturally occurring, as in what comes in on the grape or is in the winery, or it can be added - similar to when you make homemade bread and add that little packet of yeast (don’t get me started on that online recipe). The yeast then “eats” the sugar and produces two things: alcohol and CO2. Eventually, all the sugar is consumed and fermentation stops. Or so much alcohol is produced that it kills the remaining yeast and fermentation stops. Or the temperature gets to hot or too cold and fermentation stops. Or the yeast runs out of fuel (nitrogen) and the fermentation stops. Regardless, fermentation eventually stops. Hopefully, when you’re ready or you have a whole new set of problems.
When fermentation occurs varies depending on the type of wine being made due to the need for skin contact or lack thereof. For white and rose wines it occurs after pressing. For red wine it typically occurs while the juice is still in contact with the skins then the wine gets pressed.
Once you have fermented and pressed or pressed and fermented, you have wine! There’s a lot more that goes into the process, but you have wine at this point. What happens next is stylistic preferences: how do you want to store your wine to age? Barrels? What size barrels? Should they be neutral or, if toasted, to what degree? How long should the wine remain in barrel? Forget about the barrels because that sounds complicated. Let’s put the wine in stainless steel tanks. But what about big concrete eggs? Those aren’t just for grilling!
Once you’ve made all those decisions and you’re getting close to putting the wine into bottle, you will need to decide whether or not to blend, if you’re going to filter, or if you’re going to cold/heat stabilize the wine. I wrote about barrels and barrel selection in a previous blog. I also touched on filtering and cold stabilization in my wine diamonds blog. All the other winemaking variations, such as carbonic maceration (a personal favorite) and secondary fermentations, might be a future more advanced blog(s).
For now, though, these are the basics. Go forth, try your hand at winemaking, and damn me for ever posting on the internet.
M.P. Fowler
Owner & Chief Sloucher
Slouch Hat Wines
