This is how wine is made: an unromantic process (at least at the beginning)
A brief guide to winemaking, to understand how it is a job of choices, decisions and consequences. Then, of course, there are the stories, the labels, the tastings, but only after
3' min read
3' min read
Making wine is not poetry, or at least not right away. The grape, attached to the plant, if it could do its own thing, would grow free and spontaneous, climbing without many rules (it is the hand of man that reduces the vine to a bonsai) and, once its life cycle is over, would destine its fruit and seeds to the reproduction of the species. Thento vinegar and not to wine.
Sowine is produced by interrupting a natural process through the hand of man using technique and technology. But let us start from the beginning - from the vineyard in fact - and its fruit, which must not have been treated with synthetic chemicals. That would already be something to make sense of the misleading definition of 'natural wine', believe me!
The harvest time depends on the grape variety, the climate and (of course) who decides. Grapes are picked by hand if you can, with machines if you have to, but always with a generous dose of logic: the good ones don't wait, the rotten ones don't forgive.
After the harvest, the grapes enter the cellar where the vinification process begins, which can be threefold: white, rosé and red. The most common technique involves removing the stalks and then pressing, which takes place using mechanical or pneumatic presses and no longer with the feet as our grandparents did. After pressing, fermentation begins and is carried out by saccharomyces, microscopic organisms present both on the grape skins and in the air. The saccharomycetes transform the kind of unattractive mush called must, generated by pressing, into wine. Magic? No. They simply convert the sugar from the grapes into alcohol (ethyl mostly) and carbon dioxide, which escapes and apparently boils the wine.
Good cellarers know that fermentation temperatures are very important to produce good wine, but temperature control is much more useful for whites than for reds, which are much less delicate. Red wines ferment with the skins containing colouring substances, also because otherwise they would not be red wines. There are also white wines made from black grapes, as is often the case with pinot noir, for example. If the contact with the skins is brief, we will instead obtain arosé wine that is not a mix of white wine and red wine as many believe and as was once done in the tavern.
