Each winemaker guides the process in different ways—from pressing wine with your feet (like Lucy Ricardo did in that famous scene from I Love Lucy) to using complex machinery. Here are the fascinating details.
Harvest, Destemming and Sorting
The wine’s acidity, sweetness and flavor are determined the moment the grapes are picked from the vines. Harvest season typically falls between August and October. In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s between February and April. Once picked, the bunches are taken to the winery to be sorted, destemmed and crushed.
Fermentation
Yeasts transform juice into alcohol. The juicy must (from the Latin vinum mustum, “young wine”) is freshly crushed fruit juice that contains the fruit’s skins, seeds and stems) is moved from crushing or pressing into stainless steel tanks or oak barrels, where it can stay for about two weeks. With the absence of oxygen, yeast will convert the sugars of a wine grape to alcohol and carbon dioxide. The more sugar in the grape, the higher the potential alcohol. When the yeast cells die, they sink to the bottom of the fermentation tank and rest there with the grapes’ skins, seeds and pulp fragments, creating the lees (the dead yeast cells, leftover from the fermentation process.
Press and Aging
The grapes’ juice is extracted. White wines are pressed before primary fermentation, reds typically after. Chemical processes happen during aging and react over time, creating different flavors as a wine matures. Aging in casks or barrels is about instilling flavor and regulating temperature, humidity and light. Wines are typically aged in French and American oak. American white oak is considered more “oaky” and brings a vanilla aroma, while French oak contributions are more subtle and spicy.
Bottling
The wine is bottled when the winemaker determines that the wine is clear, stable and “finished.” Bottling protects the wine (tinted bottles help keep out the light) and then time does the rest.