how is wine made?

Answer 1

You put a bunch of grapes in a big tube. You smush them (either with mallets or with your feet. Drain the juice that comes out and let it sit for a few years. Chill and serve.

Answer 2

First, a winery obtains grapes in the fall from either its own vineyards, or purchased from grape farmers. The grapes are sorted, destemmed, then crushed. This is often a highly mechanized process, but some wineries employ people to hand sort the grapes. No one really uses feet to crush grapes anymore.

Depending on the winemaker's style, the grape skins may be left in contact with the juice for a period of time before allowing fermentation to start. This is a called a cold soak and is intended to extract colour and tannin from the skins.

The juice is then drained off and put into fermentation tanks. There, the juice will be allowed to ferment over a period of days to weeks. The wine maker will either use commercial yeast cultures to start the fermentation of sugar to alcohol, or allow the natural yeasts from the grape skins to do the fermenting. This is called the primary fermentation.

When fermentation is complete, the newly made wine may go through a secondary fermentation. This process is done by bacteria rather than yeast. The reaction converts very tart malic acid to milder lactic acid. This process is called malolactic fermentation. Not every winery does this. Some wineries only put part of their production through the secondary fermentation.

From there, the wine is transferred to aging containers. Usually this will take place in oak barrels, but some wineries use stainless steel tanks, especially for some of their crisp white wines. The oak will impart extra flavour and complexity to the wine, and also the porous wood will allow slow exposure to oxygen, which can help to soften tannic red wines as they age.

After that the wine may or may not go through a process of fining (using things like egg white to precipitate fine particles out of the wine) and filtering. Some wineries choose not to fine or filter the wine, in order to preserve every bit of flavour they can.

Finally comes the bottling stage, and off to market it goes.

Answer 3

Wine is very easy to make. You need fruit juice, winemaker's yeast and sugar. Mix together and seal the container with an airlock made from a pierced ziplock bag and a rubber band and put in a temperate place and fermentation begins almost immediately. Yeast turns the sugars into alcohol and when the sugar is gone the fermentation stops or, if the alcohol reachs about 18% that kills off fermentation , Then strain bottle, and age if necessary.

Answer 4

There are lots of resources on the internet which explain how wine can be made - however the best answer I ever heard was from Olivier Humbrecht who runs Zind-Humbrecht, a biodynamic winery in Alsace in Eastern France. Basically

"you squeeze ze grapes, zen you leave zem, zen you put it in a bottle. anything else is interfering wiz ze wine"

For a more in depth look at various wine-making technologies and tecnhiques see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_making

Good luck