Winemaking Process
Overview
You’re enjoying a favorite wine and the thought hits you, how did it get from grapes to this miraculous libation? Sure, you’ve taken a tour of the interworkings of a winery but maybe haven’t put all the steps together from vineyard to bottle. Should you have a few gaps of understanding and your curiosity is peaked, this topic block is for you.
Winemaking is a multi-step process. Understanding each step and how one leads to another is essential. As the topic blocks with links below illustrate, there are five primary steps to the winemaking process after harvest:
This Overview provides a high-level examination of the winemaking process.
There are also articles specific to the unique features of making white, red, and rosé wines.
Consider these sources as primers to the process, without the specificity for actual winemaking purposes.
How Wine is Made “Ilustrated” (Wineanorak)
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.
How Wine is Made: A Brief Overview (Good Pair Days)
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.
How to Make (Pretty Decent!) Wine at Home (Wine Enthusiast)
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 is the Difference Between White and Red Wine Production (VinoLove)
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.
How White Wine is Made (Wine Enthusiast)
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.
How Red Wine is Made Step by Step (Wine Folly)
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.
What Is Rosé: Quick Guide To Pink Wine (Wine Folly)
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.
How Wine is Made (Drinking N’ Life)
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.
Introduction to Winemaking (GuildSomm)
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.