Wine Making Process – Hard Work Well Worth It

The wine making process seems like it would be kind of easy on the surface but there are some intricate details. Although the grapes pretty much do all the work for you they have to be guided along in the process. The one main ingredient to making good wine is that the grapes are grown correctly and tended to well during the growth process. Mature grapes should be well tended to in order to get the best taste. That means they should have been exposed to a lot of sunlight, watered well and pruned correctly.

The first step in the wine making process is the harvesting of mature grapes. This is just as it sounds because it is the actual picking of the grapes off the vines. During this process you want to make sure you are careful to pick only those grapes ready to be fermented. It is during this time that you may want to de-stem the grapes as well. De-stemming can be done after the grapes are picked but some people like to do it during the harvesting process to save time. It’s up to the discretion of the wine maker how to do this.

The next step in the wine making process is to crush the grapes for fermentation. There are many methods to crushing grapes and crushing is defined as the gentle squeezing of the grapes to liberate the juices from the skin. The old school method of crushing the grapes is to stomp them with bare feet to split the skins open and release the inside contents. However, there are inexpensive small crushers that can be used just as effectively. In some wine making the stems are left in the mix to further advance fermenting. Temperature during this first fermentation phase is important to the taste of the wine.

The next phase of the wine making process is the pressing of the grapes to separate the wine juice from the skins and stems if any. For some wines pressing is not necessary as the wine is separated during the crushing process however you can get another 15-30% of wine out of the pressing process in some cases. Then the wine is cold and heat temperature stabilized. During the cold stabilization period the wine is kept at close to freezing for 1-2 weeks. After the cold stabilization the wine is heat stabilized to rid it of unstable proteins.