CHAPTER TWO
How Wine Is Made
Making wine is easy, right? You pick the grapes, smash ’em up, put ’em in a bottle, and voilà, wine! Wrong. Sorry, babe, but if it were that simple, I’d be using my juicer for a lot more than making empty promises about starting that detox cleanse. The winemaking process is a complicated one that varies from wine to wine and winemaker to winemaker, but having a general idea of what goes into making what’s behind the label will give you not only a greater understanding of wine but a greater appreciation for it and the hardworking people who make it. In this chapter, I’m going to walk you through the process of winemaking, and by the end of it, you’ll never call wine “adult juice” ever again.
We’ve all eaten grapes, and I would go as far as to say we’ve all drank grape juice, and probably even had our fair share of grape-flavored Popsicles (when there were no cherry ones left, of course). Yet, none of those things resemble wine and its complexities of flavors. Because while grapes are the star ingredient in wine, there is an incredible amount of technique, skill, and equipment that goes into making each bottle.
The first steps of winemaking are the same regardless of what kind of wine you’re making.
First, you have to pick the grapes. Pretty straightforward, right? There are two methods for how this is done: mechanically or by hand.
With mechanical picking, winemakers use a tractor-looking machine to pick the grapes. And by “pick,” I mean beat the vines to shake the fruit onto a conveyor belt that puts the grapes in a holding bin. This is more efficient for mass production because it cuts down on labor costs and picks a ton of grapes in a relatively short period of time. I don’t like it because there is no quality control of the grapes, but wineries, like all of us, have to do what they’ve got to do.
With handpicking, the winery has actual people picking the grapes and making sure what is being picked is healthy. There’s no downside to it, except that it costs the winery, and subsequently us consumers, more. But this is something I am personally fine paying for—not only does it lead to better wine, but it leads to more jobs.
Much like while the United States’ Santa is sleighing, the Australia Santa is surfing;* the hemispheres have different harvesting seasons. For the northern hemisphere, harvest is between August and September, and for the southern hemisphere, it’s February through April. Picking can occur during the day or at night; however, there are advantages to harvesting grapes at night, mainly because of the temperature. Not only is it cooler for workers who are putting in long hours of manual labor in the brutal summer months, but the lower temperature stabilizes grape sugars, making them firmer, easier to pick, and less likely to break. Because most grapes need to be cooled before fermentation, it saves the wineries time, money, and energy when the grapes come in at a cooler temperature from the vineyard.
No matter how you choose to harvest, the end result is you have a shit ton of grapes in bins. Grapes in bunches, grapes that are loose, grapes that still have all their stems, and whatever else from the vineyard has made it in there. The grapes are then sorted by varietal.
Varietal is a word people in wine use for “a single type of grape.” Examples of varietals* include Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Grigio, Zinfandel, Sémillon, and virtually every single grape that can produce wine. Specific grapes work better in certain regions and climates than in others, although what varietals and how many different varietals a vineyard decides to work with is entirely up to them. Some wineries choose to just focus on one grape, while others have multiple varietals they work with. Grown in long rows, each varietal has its own section. You’re not going to find four Grenache vines and then six Cabernet Franc vines all hanging out together.
But I digress, an easy thing to do when it comes to wine. The point is, you don’t want the Merlot grapes crushed with the Riesling grapes, so they must be sorted.
After the grapes have been harvested and sorted, they are usually destemmed. I say “usually” because depending on the wine and the maturity of the stems, a winemaker may choose not to destem them. Stems are very high in tannins, the biomolecules that create the cotton-mouth feeling in red wines and can be good for certain wines that are meant to age. That said, grape skins and seeds already have high concentrations of tannins, so for most wines, the grapes are destemmed.
The grapes are then crushed, either by a machine aptly called a crusher, or manually by a good old-fashioned grape-stomping session, I Love Lucy–style. Imagine having clusters of grapes under your feet and stomping them vengefully, like you’re vowing to make someone pay for wronging your family in a nineties thriller starring Denzel Washington. By the end, you’d be covered in juice, with your toes full of grape mash. That’s how it’s done manually. A crusher does that, too (with fewer quests of retribution), creating vats of straight-up grape sludge with its skins, pulp, and juice all mixed together. This chunky mishmash is called the must.
And this is where grapes go their separate ways, to become the wines they’ve always dreamed of being. Some red, some white, some perhaps even a dreamy rosé or an offbeat orange. It would be easy to assume that the varietal is what makes a wine look and taste the way it does, but in all actuality, the grape has very little to do with it. Much of a wine’s flavor and color results from its treatment during different parts of the winemaking process, such as maceration.
Maceration is the soaking and softening of grape skins with their juice. If it wasn’t for maceration, wine wouldn’t have any color, because the juice itself is clear. For white wines, the grapes are pressed and the skins are out of there quicker than a one-night stand. But for red wines, the grapes are pressed and then basically spend the entire weekend—or even weeks—unabashedly cuddling with the skins. Awww, great for them! I love their love!
RED WINES
After being crushed, a red wine’s must goes straight into steel fermentation tanks. Because red wine is fermented in its must, its juice takes on the red, purple, and black qualities of the grape skins that are chilling with it. Fermenting in its must also enhances the wine’s aromas, flavors, and tannins, making those dry, bold reds you love so much with dinner.
In these fermentation tanks, yeast converts sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Low-intervention winemakers rely solely on wild yeasts naturally existing on their grapes to do this on their own, but many winemakers add cultured yeasts to control the rate of fermentation and add flavor. Since all yeasts are natural, it’s not that these cultured yeasts are artificial, but they aren’t native to the environment. It’s like buying instant yeast to make bread: Yeah, it’s yeast, but still you bought it at a Kroger for a quick fix. Don’t expect it to taste like the sourdough of the bread makers, who use yeast from their own starter.
I like to think of the yeast like Pac-Man munching up all the sugar and leaving a trail of alcohol and carbon dioxide behind him. While alcohol is obviously a good thing in wine, carbon dioxide is not. These bubbles push all skins to the top of the fermentation tank as the gases are being released, creating a cap on the juice. This is problematic because if those skins aren’t mingling with the juice throughout the tank, you’re missing out on all the must’s benefits to the wine’s color and flavors.
To get rid of that gas, winemakers employ punch-downs and pump-overs, two more totally unembellished cellar terms. A punch-down is when a winemaker pushes the cap down from the top of the tank and stirs the tank by hand with a tool that looks like an oversize potato masher. A pump-over is when they hook a hose up to the bottom of the tank and pump the juice over the cap to mix it in. Which technique a winemaker uses, and how often, is totally up to them. Fermentation and its subsequent gas management can last days or weeks, depending on how long it takes for the yeast to eat all the sugar.
It’s worth noting that rather than this traditional fermentation, some red wines go through the process of carbonic maceration. Instead of being crushed, full bunches of red grapes are put into fermentation tanks with carbon dioxide, causing individual grapes to begin fermentation from inside their grape skins, eventually getting crushed under their own weight. Made famous by the region of Beaujolais, this is how you get Gamay and other red varietals superfresh and poppy tasting.
No matter how fermentation goes down, the tanks are drained and the leftover must is pressed to squeeze out every last delicious drop. The juice is then placed in whatever container the winemaker wants to age it in, for however long the winemaker wants to age it. If they choose steel tanks or concrete eggs, they put it in there and let it get to aging, but if a winemaker decides to age the red wine in a barrel, there’re a few more steps.
Barrel-aged wines, particularly oak-barrel-aged wines, go through malolactic fermentation. During this process, a wine hangs out in its barrel while all those tart cranberry or sour apple notes found in young red wines mellow into milder, creamier fruit notes. It’s the difference between sour strawberry Starbursts and strawberries and cream Starbursts. Both are strawberry, both are delicious, but there’s a difference in taste.
Barrel-aged wines also need to go through a process called racking. Because these barrels have been chilling in the cellars and lying on their sides while malolactic fermentation is going on, all the extra sediment settles at the bottom. Racking is when a winemaker lets the sediment sink to the bottom, and then syphons the free juice (sans sediment) into a new barrel to continue aging. Racking happens as often as the winemaker sees fit, usually every one to three months.
Some winemakers choose to filter their wine to remove more sediment before bottling, while others prefer just to go straight to the bottle. Unfiltered wines tend to be cloudy and have more sediment, although whether or not it affects the flavor of a wine is up for debate. Personally, I have found many unfiltered wines taste fresher and tarter, but it truly depends on the wine and the drinker. Either way, these wines are bottled, shipped out, bought, and poured straight into my mouth.
WHITE WINES
It doesn’t take much outside of looking at a white wine to know it’s different from a red wine, and you’d be right to assume that the process it undergoes in fermentation differs, too. While a red wine ferments with its must to get its hue and taste, a white wine quickly ditches its must to go its own way. The juice has little, if any, quality time with its skins before it is placed into tanks for racking, which is why white wines are light in color. After its sediment drops to the bottom during racking, the juice is then filtered out and put into another tank for fermentation.
Fermentation is still going to happen in its Pac-Man-like way, the yeasts eating sugar, converting it to alcohol and carbon dioxide. But because white wine is separated from its must before fermentation, winemakers leave their potato mashers and fire hoses at home. The rest of the process is just like how red wines are produced. Unbarreled white wines do their thing and age in tanks, concrete eggs, or amphorae (clay pots), and then they are bottled. Similarly, white wines that are barrel aged go through the same process as barrel-aged red wines: Juice is put in barrels, racked to remove extra sediment, aged, and finally bottled. It is then released, coming soon to a refrigerator near you.
ROSÉ
People tend to think that rosé is made from a specific kind of grape, but rosé is made just like red—using any red wine grapes and the maceration method (aka the with-skins way). The wine turns pink depending on how much time the juice is left with the skins, so your end result can be anything from heavy magenta to Himalayan sea-salt hues.
There are also two, lesser-used methods, and although they are much rarer, I can’t have you going out in the world, drinking bomb-ass rosés, only to find yourself in a conversation with some jerky “rosé aficionado” who is like, “What do you mean you don’t know what saignée is?” Saignée is a method where a producer is making a straight-up red wine, and then bleeds off some of the juice early in fermentation. With less juice in the tank, the wine has more contact with skins, creating deeper reds. The rosy-colored juice that was bled off is then fermented on its own to create rosé. This happens most commonly in Provence, France, with wines like Mourvèdre and Syrah. Rosé can also be made by blending a little red wine into white wine, but this is primarily a sparkling wine thing that you will find in places like Champagne. After that, it undergoes the same process as red wines and white wines: the whole barreling and racking versus not barreling and racking. Got it? Yeah, you do!
ORANGE WINES
Despite the name, orange wines are not made from oranges. They’re white wines that are made like red wines—with the juice fermenting with the skins from anywhere between a couple days to many months. Often referred to as “skin-contact” wines, they can be anywhere from straw gold to vibrant orange in color. This length of time with the skins also gives orange wines characteristics similar to red wines, big in body and dry with more tannic structure, though they maintain the acidity of white wines. That being said, they taste nothing like red wines or white wines. Orange wines have a whole other realm of flavor that spans from bruised apples to sour beer.
SPARKLING WINE
It doesn’t take a New Year’s party to know that sparkling wine is special. From its iconic cork pop to its strings of tiny bubbling pearls, sparkling wine is glittering and giddy, which is why it’s the wine of choice for celebratory occasions and spraying in hot tubs. Anyone who has had more than one glass of sparkling wine in their life can tell you that not all sparkling wines are made the same. Which is true, because there’re actually four different ways.
Traditional Method (Méthode Traditionnelle)
Traditional Method is what put Champagne on the map, although this method is also used for other types of sparkling wine, like Cava and Franciacorta. In the Traditional Method, winemakers take the base wine that has already been fermented (sometimes it’s a blend of multiple base wines, called a cuvée) and put it in bottles with more yeast and sugar to begin another round of fermentation, called tirage. These bottles are then sealed with crown caps (the cap you find on beer and the good old-fashioned Coca-Cola bottles) to trap the carbonation. They are then aged for a certain period of time before being riddled, a confusing word for placing the bottles tilting downward and regularly rotating them so all the dead yeast, or lees, settles in the neck of the bottle.
The bottles are then disgorged, which isn’t as violent as it sounds (although still volatile when done manually). Disgorgement is a form of filtration. Once all the lees settle in the neck of the bottles during riddling, they are then put in freezing brine so that the lees freeze and can be removed later by taking off the crown cap and letting the bubbles pop them out. The bottles are then dosed, or topped off with some wine and sugar, before being corked and made ready for rap videos or just regular brunch-time imbibing.
Tank Method
Also known as Charmat Method, this is widely used, especially for Prosecco, and is not nearly as complicated as Traditional Method. Basically, the winemaker is like, “Yo, let’s take that base wine out of the tank and then put it in another tank for the second fermentation.” Like tirage but without individual bottles, sugar and yeast are added to the second fermentation tank. Rather than being riddled and disgorged, the wines are filtered before being dosed and bottled.
Transfer Method
It’s just like Traditional Method, except that after tirage, the bottles are filtered in another tank rather than being riddled and disgorged. This is primarily used for wines in giant, large-format bottles you’re rarely, if ever, going to drink. I mean, have you ever drank out of a jeroboam? Because I sure haven’t.
Pétillant Naturel
Lovingly referred to as Pét-Nat, the cutest nickname ever, Pétillant Naturel used to be considered a rare and primitive way of making sparkling wine, but in recent years it’s been making a comeback. Which, thank God, because the wines it produces are deliciously tart with soft bubbles. Pét-Nat is unique, because unlike other sparkling wines, which require two rounds of fermentation, Pét-Nat only uses one. Halfway through its first fermentation, the wine is bottled with a crown cap. There are no added sugars or yeast because as the juice finishes its fermentation in the bottle, there is nowhere for the carbon dioxide to escape to, and so the wine becomes bubbly.
THE ROLE OF A WINEMAKER
Each of these processes is extremely important to winemaking, but not as important as how a winemaker decides to use them. Each winemaker is like a scientist-artist who uses these tools and techniques to create a unique expression of their grapes. Since this is my book and I get to choose the analogies we’ll use, let’s say winemakers are like the Beatles. The Beatles didn’t invent music. They didn’t even invent the type of music they played. But it was how they played it, how they produced it, how they performed it that made it so special.
Let’s take the song “Till There Was You” as an example. This track is originally from The Music Man, an aptly named musical that you probably have never seen if I haven’t (and I did a loooot of musical theater growing up). I’m sure The Music Man is great, but I’ve watched some videos of the musical performance of “Till There Was You” and it’s beautiful but totally not my kind of jam. I would not be caught dead attempting to sing it. But the Beatles’ cover of “Till There Was You” is a song I belt out every morning in my kitchen in my underwear, doing the dishes. It’s Paul’s sweetness, George’s banging guitar solo, and Ringo maybe doing the best drumming of his life on those bongos that make it stick to my soul. The song is the same, but the interpretation is entirely unique.
It reminds me of Chardonnay. For a long time, all the Chardonnay I had ever tried tasted the same: thick and buttery, like the Pillsbury Doughboy’s piss. I hated it with every taste bud in my mouth, avoided it like poison, and spoke very unkindly of it to anyone who would listen. But then I visited Scribe Winery in Sonoma in 2013. Although I was a huge fan of their reds, I was still scared of oak-bombed bottles of white. When it came time to taste their skin-fermented Chardonnay, I remember thinking—no, praying—“Just smile. Please, just smile.” I’m terrible at hiding my feelings, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was offend one of my favorite wineries. I took a sip.
And I didn’t gag.
I didn’t even frown.
Their skin-fermented Chardonnay was unlike anything I had ever tasted before. Where I had expected nauseating cream and fruit, there was punchy citrus and tropical nuances. There was a medium body but with a yearning dryness. In fact, there were bells. On a hill. That I had never heard ringing. And birds in the sky that I had never even fucking seen winging!
That day, I drank my words. I had condemned an entire varietal out of ignorance. It never crossed my mind that Chardonnay grapes didn’t naturally taste like vanilla and butter, that someone made them taste that way. I’d been running my mouth about how terrible it was, when in all reality, Chardonnay was an innocent grape that got caught up in the wine game. It wasn’t its fault a bunch of assholes in the nineties started prioritizing the flavor of oak over the actual wine, and the style has hung around in our supermarkets ever since.
This was one of the most important and formative experiences in my wine drinking. It humbled me, and took me from ABC across the belly (Anything But Chardonnay) to being open-minded and curious about all wine. And most important, it made me understand, respect, and admire the role of the winemaker.
Because wine isn’t just grapes: It’s what someone does with those grapes that makes it worth singing about.
Dude. We did it.
Phewf!
[Wipes sweat from brow.]
How wine is made is tough stuff, even when you’re only scratching the surface of the subject. I didn’t mention it at the top of the chapter because I didn’t want you thinking it was boring shit you could skip. Not saying you’re that kind of person, but I am that kind of person. I’m a lazy hedonist, and definitely would have just skimmed through it and gotten to the “fun stuff.” But you can’t do that with wine. To fully enjoy the “fun stuff,” you have to understand the fundamental stuff first.
Luckily, we don’t have to worry about it because you crushed this chapter like whole clusters of Carignan.
To-Drink List:
- Go to the wine store.
- Get two bottles of the same varietal but from two different producers, one oaked and one unoaked.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help! That’s what the people are there for, I promise.
- Taste a glass of each wine side by side.
- Taste the rainbow! Just kidding, taste how different the wines are. Oak has a very distinct flavor, making it easy to taste how much different winemaking techniques can affect the exact same grape.