How wine is made
by Brenda Francis
Do you scratch your head when the winemaker starts taking about skin contact, barriques, or lees stirring? Just like any industry, the wine business has its own lingo. Being able to appreciate the art requires that you have a grasp on the vocabulary.
     The sooner a ripe grape is crushed the better. Dom Perignon, the innovative monk that propelled Champagne into the limelight, crushed his grapes in the vineyard as they were picked. Some producers prefer to use the weight of the grapes to release the juice, called free run. This is considered the best juice. After collecting the free run juice, a producer can elect to press the grapes to collect the remaining juice. Pressing gently squeezes the grapes. A producer can use free run or a press, or both.
     This is where red, rosé, and white wine are different. Red and rosé wines are made with grapes with red or purple skins. The juice rests on the skins for up to a week. In order to impart enough color to the juice, producers punch down the cap of skins that floats to the top of the vat several times a day. Many producers do this by hand. Others use a pump over method, which pulls the juice from the bottom and pours it over the cap.
     White wine grapes are green to gold in color and when crushed and their skins are removed immediately. A white wine producer can elect to stir the lees, a process that imparts a creamy flavor. Lees are sediment consisting of dead yeast cells, like the sediment on the bottom of a homemade beer.
     The yeast is added shortly after the grapes are crushed. The grape sugar is continuously measured as the fermentation takes place. As the yeast eats the sugar, the alcohol rises and the sugar declines. As fermentation slows the wine is moved to a container for aging, usually a barrel (barrique), stainless steel tank, or glass lined concrete vat.
     The wine can be transferred to or from barrels, fined, or filtered before going to the bottle. Fining is a process where solids, like egg whites, are added to the wine to draw particulates to the bottom. Filtering is where the wine is drawn through a filter. There is a trend moving away from fining and filtering.
     Of course there is a whole technical side to this process that would fill a text book or forty, but for those of us that like to enjoy the fruits of someone else's labor, a little bit of knowledge is just enough.