Do you want to know how wine is made? What is the winemaking process and how is wine made?
The making of wine is one of those processes that have been perfected over the years. Every single wine is unique. This is due to all the alterations that can happen in the making. The climate of the origin place, the grapes, the preparation, its process… It’s a unique development that with only one variation in the process of production, can cause alterations in its flavor.
In today’s blog of Taca de vi, we want to explain how this process works so, if you want to get to know the process of elaboration and production of your favorite wines, keep reading, ¡you won’t regret it!
The process of making wine
Like we said earlier, every wine has its unique taste but, it is true that there’s a traditional way of producing wine, and therefore some steps that we must follow as a base.
In the following lines, we will guide you through the process that the grape follows until it turns into the famous beverage that we drink along with our meals.
These are the general steps that we must follow to get the most flavor out of our grapes for the wine.
1. Farming the Grapes
As we said earlier, first things first, we must get our raw material, the fruit. There’re many varieties of grapes. It’s important to know that the grapes that we eat as a dessert or on new year’s, are not the same grapes that we have to use to make wine. Although it’s the same fruit, they are not the same species. To be able to make wine of quality, we need grapes of the species Vitis vinifera, a species of grape that will bring us the best results in our final product. If you’re interested in visiting vineyards and getting to know the different varieties of grapes and more information about them, we suggest this wine tours in Barcelona.
Inside this species of grape, there are some variations, this will allow us to choose the type of grape for the wine we want to elaborate on.
2. Harvesting of the fruit
As we’ve mentioned, the time of maturation of the fruit is three years. This period is orientative because, in order to tell if the fruit is ready to start the wine elaboration, we must run some tests of acidity, sugar, and its point of maturation. These factors will assure us that the fruit is ready, and we have to be quite quick in starting the wine development to make sure that the grape doesn’t emit any unpleasant smells.
The process of elaboration of wine is really slow and it requires a lot of patience. We can start seeing how long it’s going to take from the very first step. When we plant our grapes, we have to wait a minimum of three years so we can be sure that the fruit is ready for the following steps.
3. Preparing the grapes
Before starting to develop the beverage, we must prepare the grapes for the process. Before doing anything, we must separate the fruit from the little branches it grows from, since they are not needed for any following step of the process, and we have to make sure that the preparation is as clean as possible.
Currently, this process is mechanized, there’s a machine that will be responsible to do so in a faster and more efficient way than if we did it as it was done before.
It depends on the type of grape that we want to achieve, we might have to add more steps to prepare the grape, like for example, peeling it, etc.
4. Pressing
In this step we start seeing the first results, this is the first time where we can observe one of the most important steps of this whole process.
This part of the process can be completed thanks to a machine that it’s devoted mainly to pressing the fruit. Many of us may remember this step as the one that was done many years ago by people stepping on it with their feet. Nowadays, there’s machinery that does the work for us, since it would be a cumbersome procedure.
This machine presses with the right amount of pressure, so that the seeds from the grapes don’t break, because it could give our wine a bitter taste. Depending on the kind of wine we’re trying to achieve, this step will be done as step 3 or 4.
5. Fermentation of the grapes
In this phase of the fermentation, we must add a special sugared yeast to the juice that we’ve extracted from the grape so that it transforms into alcohol. During this period of fermentation, the mosto is constantly being put under a certain amount of control to guarantee the best quality of the wine.
There are factors that we have to take care of so that this procedure gets good results, one of them being the temperature. For this course to go in the best way, we should keep the wine at temperatures between 30º and 15 degrees Celsius. Once 10 days have gone by, and the controls come back good, we should proceed with the packing and bottling of our wine, and it’s finally ready for its consumption.
With these 5 steps, we should be ready to try our new creation, even though five steps seem like they should be done in a short period, the process of making wine requires a lot of patience and knowledge of its production. We know that many people won’t be able to wait all the time that’s needed or moving from their home, that’s why, we recommend you to try two activities that we propose: you can do a wine tastings at home, you’ll find all the info needed on our website. For those who don’t like the idea of doing it from home, you can do an online wine tasting too.
Now you have no excuse, you know the process, and you have all the means needed to have a nice experience, of course, accompanied by a good glass of wine. ¿Will you sign up?
