It all starts with grapes on the vine: and it’s important that these are properly ripe. Not ripe enough, or too ripe, and the wine will suffer. The grapes as they are harvested contain the potential of the wine: you can make a bad wine from good grapes, but not a good wine from bad grapes.
If you’re like us, you probably spend a fair amount of time enjoying your favorite bottles. However, the chances are, most of the time you (like almost everyone else) take this wonderful drink a little for granted.
It’s no more complicated to make wine than sourdough bread, but it requires more time and a few special tools. You’ll also get to put your creative juices to use and gain a better appreciation for professional winemakers.
What types of wines do you know? Even a person completely far from wine, and who has never attended wine tastings, has not visited wineries, will tell you that wine, of course, can be red and white. What is the difference? It would seem simple: red wine is made from red grapes, white – from white.
To make white wine is quite simple in concept. A winemaker gets some freshly harvested grapes, presses the juice out of them, ferments that juice using yeast, lets it mature and then bottles the wine. In reality, the process takes twists and turns at each stage, even though grape juice and yeast are the only necessary ingredients.
Follow along to see how red wine is made, step-by-step, from grapes to glass. Surprisingly, not much has changed since we started making wine 8,000 years ago. Red winemaking differs from white winemaking in one important way: the juice ferments with grape skins to dye it red.
Pink wine happily spans the colorspace between red and white wine, in a way, rosé is more like a state of mind. Rosé happens when the skins of red grapes touch wine for only a short time. Where some red wines ferment for weeks at a time on red grape skins, rosé wines are stained red for just a few hours.
A high-level and well composed short animated video of the winemaking process, which begins when the grapes are ready for harvest, and continues through crushing and de-stemming, fermenting, racking and storage, and bottling. If you’re not familiar with the wine making process, this one’s for you.
Well-produced video overview of winemaking from a commercial perspective. Covers the entirety of winemaking from the vineyard to the bottle. Several professionals lend their thoughts at different points of the winemaking process.
