How the Heck is Wine Actually Made?

Ep 121

What if the magic in your glass could be traced step by step from vineyard to bottle?

In this episode, I’m giving you a beginner-friendly journey through the winemaking process. From planting the vines to harvesting grapes, you’ll learn the essential factors that shape wine long before it reaches your glass. You’ll also hear how grapevines grow and ripen each season from bud break to flowering to véraison before they’re finally ready for harvest.

Once the grapes are picked we’ll move into the winery, breaking down the steps of sorting, crushing, pressing, and fermentation. Along the way, you’ll learn the meaning behind common wine terms like “must,” “maceration,” and “lees,” explained in plain English so you feel more confident next time you hear them at a tasting.

We’ll also explore the differences between red, white, rosé, orange, and sparkling wines, plus how fermentation vessels like stainless steel, oak, and even clay amphora impact flavor and texture. And since the wine bottle also makes a difference, you’ll learn about the role of aging, bottling choices (including corks vs. screw caps), and how those final decisions influence the wine in your glass.

So, whether you’re new to wine or looking to deepen your knowledge, this episode will give you a clear, approachable overview of how grapes transform into the wines you love!

Thank you to Wine.com for sponsoring this episode. Go to Wine.com/corkfizz and use code CORKFIZZ for FREE shipping on your order over $150. (Limit one per customer.)

Resources:

All about Sparkling Wine - https://www.corkandfizz.com/blog/guide-to-wine-podcast-episode-44

What is an Orange Wine - https://www.corkandfizz.com/blog/guide-to-wine-podcast-episode-18

Episode Highlights:

• Going back to basics: How is wine actually made
• The vineyard decisions that shape grape quality: climate, soil, and grape variety
• Key stages in the grape growing cycle: bud break, flowering, véraison, harvest
• Sorting, crushing, and pressing: what really happens to the grapes
• Fermentation made simple with a fun Pac-Man analogy
• The difference between natural and cultured yeasts
• Winemaking jargon decoded: must, maceration, lees, malolactic fermentation
• Style breakd

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Transcript

0:09

Interested in learning about wine, but not sure where to start. You're in the right place. Welcome to the Cork and Fizz Guide to Wine podcast. I'm your host, Hayley Bowlman, and I'm so glad you're here. I'm a wine enthusiast turned wine educator and founder of the Seattle based wine tasting business, Corporate Cork and Fizz. It is my goal to build your confidence in wine by making it approachable and lots of fun. You can expect to learn everything from how to describe your favorite wine to what to pair with dinner tonight, and so much more. Whether you're a casual wine sipper or a total cork dork like myself, this podcast is for you. So grab yourself a glass and let's dive in foreign. Welcome back to the Cork and Fizz Guide to Wine podcast. So excited to have you here. Today we're going back to the basics. We are going to take a journey from vineyard to glass. We're going to talk about how grapes become wine. And I know it can be, you know, wine can sometimes feel really intimidating. There is so much that you can learn. And honestly, as a cork dork like myself, that's like the coolest thing. And it's like this amazing opportunity, but I know for someone who kind of just wants to drink wine but maybe know a little bit more about it, it's like, holy heck, why do I need to know about all this, right? And there's like super expensive wines and it can just like, there's so much to know and so it can feel intimidating. But at its heart, wine is just fermented grape juice with a lot of artistry and science behind it. So in today's episode, you can expect to learn how grapes grow from the vineyard to making your glass of wine. We'll talk about the different styles of wine and how they're red, white, and even orange and sparkling wine. And I'm going to try to go through some winemaking jargon along the way in case you hear it at your next vineyard or your next winery. Stop. And they're explaining the wine to you and they use a word and you're like, I have no idea what they just said. Hopefully now maybe you'll have a little idea of what they just said. All right, let's get into it. Okay, starting off, step one happens. Before you even think about making wine, you have to think about your vineyard. And so the first step is planting the grapevines. And to do that, you need to choose the best site and some of the things that, you know, wine growers and vineyard growers are going to think of is one, what is the climate? And the thing is, it's not just the climate, but it's the macroclimate. What's the, you know, the regional climate, what's the mesoclimate, which is site specific. So exactly. On this hill here, if I put a vineyard, what would the climate be like? And then there's even something called the microclimate, and that's the immediate vine environment. So if I grew, you know, grapevines on this hill, and I had them facing this way and I had them in this soil, you know, what would be the climate in this area? Again, I kind of mentioned it already. Soil composition is another thing they're going to think of. What type of soil is it? What is the drainage like, where's the water source, what's the nutrient availability? And they're going to think of the topography. So the altitude, right? At what altitude are we at? What is the slope? What is the aspect? And that impacts the sunlight exposure and the temperature that these vineyards are going to be affected by. Now, when they choose their site, the other thing they need to think about is choosing the grape variety. And maybe they already know what variety they want to do and they're choosing a site to grow it on, or they have a site and they need to think about what grape will grow best here. Because you're not going to plant Pinot Noir in the same place that you're going to plant Malbec. That's just not really going to happen pretty much anywhere. I'm trying to think of, like, where you might see that. But honestly, most sites, you would, you know, one of them is made better for the other. Now, once you plant the grapevines, the grapevines go through an annual cycle, so during the winter, they are dormant. They kind of sort of look dead. And then early in the spring, you get bud break. This is where they just start to grow those little buds, and then they will flower. And that's where obviously you get the flowering. You'll get the grapes that will start growing. Then towards the end of the summer, you have Vries on. And this is essentially ripening. This is where the grapes will change color. So they'll change from green to the kind of golden color if they're a white or green to that purplish red if they are a red grape. And then, of course, after they ripen, they are ready to harvest. And then this cycle just repeats itself. Just a quick reminder, if you are not on my mailing list yet. What are you waiting for? I would love for you to join. When you do, you'll get a free shopping guide that has 15 of my favorite wines under $15. Head to corkandfizz.com, scroll down to the bottom, and there'll be a little section where you can join the mailing list. I send out a weekly newsletter filled with wine tips, recommendations, special offers, and so much more. Now, let's get back to the show. When thinking about harvesting again, it's not just as easy as, like, oh, it's September 10th, time to go harvest the grapes. No. Every year the date changes, and there's so many things that the vineyard either the vineyard owners, the vineyard workers, the winemaker that they need to think about. They need to think about the ripeness of the grape. So what is the sugar level? And they can actually measure this. It's called Brix B R I X. They can measure the level of Brix in the grapes, and that tells them how sweet it is. They're going to measure that versus the acidity balance, and that's going to be the PH level and the tartaric acidity level. Then when they decide that, okay, this is the ripeness level, they need to make a decision between hand picking or machine picking. Now, sometimes the site decides that for them. If it is a very steep slope or if the grapevines are planted together very closely, they got to do it by hand. If it is possible for them to do machine picking, they might want to do that. It's more efficient, but you're going to get more of what's called mog, which is material other than grape. That'll make it harder when you're trying to sort the grapes and can make that process longer. It could also mean that you have a lower quality wine because you weren't as selective about picking your grapes. But it's not always a bad thing. Sometimes it's efficient and it works really great. Okay, now we have harvested our grapes. We are taking them to the winery. What's the first thing we need to do? We need to sort the grape. So this is basically removing any damaged or unripe clusters and any of that mog. So anything other than grapes, get that out of there. A lot of times this looks like an assembly line, and you got people just, like, looking over the grapes, picking out anything that does not look good. Now, for making some wines, they might choose to de stem the grapes. And this isn't always true. If you ever hear about someone making a wine where it had a stem inclusion or it was whole cluster, that likely means they did not de stem the grapes. And so that's basically just the process of separating the grapes from the stems. It helps reduce tannins and vegetal flavors, but sometimes you want those in the wine. Now comes the time to get some juice out of the grapes. And so there are two different processes that you might do in order to get the juice. The first is going to be crushing. Crushing the grapes gently breaks the skins to release juice, and it creates must. Must is basically the mixture of juice, skins, seeds, and pulp. This is what you're going to do primarily for red wines, because we want to include the skins and the seeds in that. The other option is pressing the grapes. So the grapes are placed directly into a press to separate the juice from the solids. We don't want the grape skins and the seeds for our white wine. Usually this method helps maintain the wine's light color. Here are some key points about pressing. The first press will produce a free run wine, which is clearer and lighter. And then the second press results in a press wine, which is more concentrated and tannic. Right. Because there's less juice in ratio to the amount of stems that were left upright when they were pressing it. So. Right. We talked about white wines typically are pressed, and then red wines are usually crushed. Wines can either be made by pressing or. Or crushing. It just depends on the desired color and the flavor intensity. We'll talk more about wines in a little bit. Now, remember I said I was gonna tell you a little bit about wine jargon here. I already mentioned one of them, and that is grape must or wine must. And this is basically just crushed grapes, juice, skins, seeds, and stems. Another term you might hear at this point when we're thinking about making the juice is maceration. Especially you might hear somebody say, oh, it was a long maceration. This is where you soak the juice with the skins and the seeds to get a lot of color and tannin. So we're primarily gonna do this with a red wine. If we do it for a wine, we're gonna do it for a very short amount of time. But we're basically trying to get the juice to take on the color of the skins and then also gather some tannins from the skins and the seeds. Okay, now we have grape juice. We gotta turn it into wine. So what we're gonna do is take that juice through a process called fermentation. And the way I like to describe this fermentation, it is like the main. There's a lot of other like, processes that a wine can go through. But this is like the chemical equation to understand. And I promise it's super simple. And I have a video game analogy to help explain it. So what you're going to think about is when you have grape juice, there are sugars in the grape juice. Now you're going to add yeast to those sugars. So either you're going to add it, like physically add it, or there might be yeast that already exists on the skins of the grapes and in the winery that just naturally gets added to the sugars. Either way, one side of our equation is yeast and sugars. The yeast eats the sugars. And this is where my video game analogy comes in. I like to think of the yeast as Pac man, right? That little yellow circle guy that goes around and eats all the dots. Okay? Yeast is the Pac man and the dots are sugars. Yeast goes around and eats all the sugars it can find. And when it eats the sugar, it produces alcohol and carbon dioxide. Now this is where Pac man kind of fails me. Someone once said, like, imagine Pac man, like poops out the alcohol and carbon dioxide and I'm like, eh, that works for you, that works for you. But basically you need to think about yeast eats the sugar, and as it eats sugar, it produces alcohol and carbon dioxide. This also tells you that the more sugar that's in the grape juice, the more alcohol you're going to end up with. Right? Because with each bit of sugar that the yeast eats, the more alcohol it creates, that carbon dioxide is left off into the air. As long as we're making a wine without bubbles, if we are making a wine with bubbles, we're going to trap that carbon dioxide so we can get some bubbly going on. Now, when it comes to yeast, I already mentioned, there are two different options. You can either have a natural, which is like a wild yeast, or or a cultured yeast. And I like to think of the cultured yeast kind of like when you're making sourdough, you have a yeast that you add to make the bread. Natural fermentation relies on indigenous yeast present on grape skins and in the winery. The cultured yeast kind of think like this sourdough yeast or really any bread yeast. There are specific yeast strains that are added to control fermentation characteristics and flavor profiles. The thing is, is it's not really an either or situation. Many winemakers will choose to actually do a combination of these. So they might let the wine start with a natural fermentation, but it might be taking too long. They might want to control the temperature, they might want to control the flavor, they might run out of the yeast and so they'll add specific cultured yeast to help the process along. Another important thing about fermentation is where you do the fermentation. There are lots of options here. You can do the fermentation in a stainless steel tank. This will help with temperature control. And it's inert so it doesn't impart any flavors on your wine. Another good kind of inert option is a concrete tank. Again, thermal stability and then there's micro oxygenation and again no flavor imparting on the wine. If you want some flavor to happen or you're looking for something a little different, you could ferment your wine in an oak barrel. This adds complexity and flavor compounds like vanilla. It also adds tannins. Oak and wood have their own tannins, so it will add that and potentially a toastiness because they actually toast the inside of oak barrels. You could also ferment an amphora or a clay vessel. These are very traditional methods that can impart unique characteristics. Okay, let's talk about some important jargon or terminology when it comes to fermenting. I'm so grateful to the sponsors who help make this podcast possible. And Today's sponsor is one I personally love wine.com you know I'm all about exploring new wines, but let's be real, it's not always easy to find unique bottles, especially if you're limited to what's near you. That's why I love shopping on wine.com they have a huge selection wines at every price point, user friendly search features and real wine experts ready to help you find your next favorite bottle. And here's a special deal just for you as a podcast listener. Get free shipping on orders over $150@wine.com corkfizz with promo code Corkfizz My recommendation, build a mix of 6 to 12 bottles to try some, you know, some you never heard of. Not sure what to pick. Message me. I'd love to help or take advantage of the live chat wine experts@wine.com have you ever heard of lees? L E E S Lees are basically this is going to sound weird. They are dead yeast cells. So when the yeast is done eating the sugar and there's no more sugar to eat, it dies and become lees. Now typically where you heal lees the most, you might hear the term surly or this was mixed or this had long contact on the lees something along those lines. When you allow the wine to rest on the lees, it can add texture and flavor to the wine. In terms of flavor, a lot of times it's kind of like a yogurt or like a fresh bread flavor that can be added to the wine. Another term you might hear is cold fermentation. So during the fermentation process, there is also some heat being created. Right. Anytime there's a process where one thing changes to something else, it's not uncommon for heat to be created. And so a lot of times, if they want to keep freshness in the wine, if the wine gets too hot, you can lose that freshness in the flavor. They might choose to do a cold fermentation. It'll take longer, but it'll kind of preserve the flavor and the freshness. This is often done for white wines. Last thing I'm going to talk about when we're talking about fermentation is actually a secondary fermentation called malolactic fermentation. This is a wine that I feel like a lot of people associate with Chardonnay because it creates that kind of buttery feel. But interestingly enough, malolactic fermentation is actually most commonly done in red wines. Almost every red wine goes through malolactic fermentation. I know, crazy, right? So this fermentation is basically a secondary fermentation. So we already created the alcohol. And then in this one, there are lactic bacteria that convert malic acid, which is naturally present in the wine. It's kind of. It's the same acid that you find in a green apple, so very tart. And it converts that into a softer lactic acid, which is the acid you'd find in milk. So it's softer. Right. And it doesn't give it the buttery flavor necessarily. It gives it the feel of it. If you don't let it go fully through malolactic fermentation, you can get that butter flavor as well. But again, while this is associated with Chardonnay, and there are some white wines that go through this process, most of the time, it's a red wine, and you're not getting that, like, butter flavor in a red wine. You're getting more of that softness. Okay, let's take a second in our winemaking process to talk about how the process is different depending on the style of wine you're making. So first off, a white wine, we already talked about this. The grapes are pressed first, right? So they're pressed and they're removed from the skin. So we just get the juice. We're fermenting just the juice, they often do a cooler fermentation, so it can take a little longer. But they want to keep it cool, keep it fresh. And then a lot of times there is lees stirring again. Those are those dead yeast cells. Gives it a little flavor. Flavor gives it a little bit of a, like, richer texture and mouth feel. Okay. A red wine. A red wine fermentation happens with the skin so that we're going to crush the grapes and we're going to keep the juice in contact with the skins and the seeds for color and for tannin. This maceration, again, that's the amount of time that we leave the skins and the seeds in contact with the juice. That time matters. The longer it's in there, generally the darker color and the more tannin we're gonna get. But often it can also, like, determine the type of tannin. So weirdly enough, sometimes the longer you leave it in, the softer the tannin becomes. I know that seems a little counterintuitive, but that's what winemakers have told me, so I'm gonna trust them. And sometimes if you only leave the juice in contact with the skins and seeds for a little bit, you'll get a lighter color, but that tannin might be more pronounced and like, bite a little bit more. With a red wine, you also have to do these processes called punch downs or pump overs. Basically what happens is the grape skins and the seeds in the juice mixture tend to float to the top. And so you don't want just the top of your juice in contact with those grape skins. You want all of the juice. And so you need to get those skins in contact with all the wine. So you'll either punch down, which nowadays this is mostly automated. They did have like, what looked like giant potato mashers that would do this, but now a lot of times there are machines that look like giant potato mashers that automate it, or somebody actually goes and does it by hand. The other option is called a pumpover. And this is where you connect a large tube, I guess, to the bottom of the tank or barrel, whatever you're using, and you pump the juice back over on top of the skins. Either way, we're just trying to get more of the juice in contact with the skins. Okay. Can technically be made by blending red and white wine. Not super common, though. Most commonly a is made with red grapes that have limited skin contact. Their maceration time is super, super low. So we're still using the red grapes, but we're only going to let it Macerate for, like, maybe a few hours up to a day. And this means that it's not going to get as dark, it's not going to get as much of the color, not going to get as much of the tannins. And we're going for something fresh and light. You're likely going to do a cooler fermentation with the as well, because we want to get a lot of that freshness that we get with a white wine. But again, we're using red grapes to make it. Now, an orange wine is basically the opposite. We're going to take white grapes and we're going to treat them like a red wine. So we are not going to separate the skins from the juice. We are going to leave the skins and the seeds and all that stuff in contact with the juice, and we're gonna have it do a maceration period. This is often why orange wines are also called skin contact. It means the juice was in contact with the skins. Again, we're using white grapes. This gives the wine an amber color and more texture. Sparkling wines are kind of their own complicated situation, but super simply put, they go through a first fermentation. This is where you make the base wine, and you usually do it making, like, a white wine. So we're gonna do the white wine style, unless you're making a sparkling. But let's imagine like a blanc sparkling, a white sparkling. So you're gonna use the white wine method to make your base wine. Then you're gonna do a second fermentation. So we're gonna add more yeast, add more sugar, and you can either do that in a tank or a bottle. Do it in a tank. It's called the Charmat method, which is like Prosecco. Do it in a bottle. It's called the traditional method, which is like champagne. After it goes through all that, if it is done in a bottle, you need to disgorge the bottle. This is where you get rid of all of the leaves. Remember dead yeast. You're learning things already. We gotta get rid of the dead yeast cells in there and all the other stuff so they disgorge it. Get that stuff out of there. Add a little more sugar and wine. Usually if it's a brut natural, meaning no sugar, they'll just add extra wine and then put a cork back on it, and then you get your delicious sparkling. I have a whole podcast episode on sparkling wine which goes way deeper into it than just this. Highly recommend listening to that. But just in case you're curious, that's a Little. Little quick rundown. Okay. Now that we've made our wine, a lot of wines go through an aging and maturation process. Your options for aging the wine, again, very similar to what methods you would use for fermenting the wine. So you could age in stainless steel or an inert vessel. And this basically will preserve the fruit purity without adding other flavors. You can also age in concrete again, so concrete eggs aren't going to add a lot of flavor or influence. You can also age in amphora. Those are those clay vessels. Again, it's microhoxygenation, so it keeps it out of contact with oxygen. Really helps preserve the fruit flavors without adding any other flavor like the oak does. Which brings me to our last option, which is oak barrels. Now, if you decide on oak barrels, you have other decisions to make. First, what type of oak barrel would you like? French oak, American oak, Hungarian oak. Each of these impart different flavors. You also figure out how old do you want the barrels to be. Newer barrels impart more flavor, and we're talking flavor here. We're thinking like cinnamon, vanilla, wood. Obviously, it gives it kind of a woodsy flavor. Coconut is another one. Coffee, chocolate. So newer barrels impart more flavor. Older barrels are more neutral. Especially once a barrel's been used for, like, I don't know, five, six years, it's really not going to give it too much flavor. The other thing you can decide on is the size of your barrels. If you use a small barrel, kind of what we all think of, and we think of a wine barrel, it's going to have more surface area contact with the wine, thus giving it more flavor. Larger barrels, again, less surface area, less flavor imparting happening on it. So basically, you're thinking oak is going to give extra flavor. Vanilla spice toast. It's also going to be in contact with oxygen because oak barrels are porous. So there is a little oxygen that gets in there, can help soften the wine versus stainless steel or concrete. We're thinking freshness and no oxygen contact. White wines are usually aged for shorter periods, whereas reds are aged for longer. Longer aging can help soften tannins and enhance the complexity, which is generally what we want in a red wine. Whites, we typically want to be fresher, but that's not always true for all white wines. After the aging process, or I guess it could happen before, too. During this time, you're also going to have a process of clarification, fining, and filtering. So there are a couple terms here that I think are useful to understand. One is racking this is transferring the wine off the sediment. So a lot of times when you leave wine to sit, some of the sediment falls out of the wine. We want to transfer that wine off the sediment into a clean vessel. Fining the wine is where you add agents, things like bentonite, egg whites, easing glass to remove suspended particles in the wine. This is not, I think, fining and filtering get mixed up. Because you think fining is like, almost like I'm thinking of, like, you know, during the gold rush, and you're, you know, shaking your. Your pan back and forth, trying to get the gold and get all the rocks out of the way of the gold. That's not fining. Fining is actually adding a component to the wine that, like, combines with these particles in the wine that you don't want and then falls out of it. So you always end up removing it. But this is why a wine might not be vegan, because a lot of times we can use egg whites or isinglass, which is fish skins. I want to say, I know something related to fish. And again, these are not actually in the wine. By the time you drink it, they do fall out and they are removed, but they are used to make the wine. The wine can also go through a filtration process. And so this is passing the wine through filters to remove solids and microbes. And lastly, now you have your wine, it is time to bottle it. And so even in the bottling process, there are choices to be made, right? You need to think about the color of the bottle. A darker bottle will protect it against the UV light. You also want to think about the shape of the bottle. This often indicates the type of wine. So a lot of us wine dorks out there can, like, even if you like, we. You blind, you know, you wrap up a wine bottle, I could probably guess what it was based off the shape. Some of the time. There's, like, certain bottle shapes that mean different things, and you will have to decide the closure type. Do you want a cork that could be synthetic or natural, or do you want a screw cap? And honestly, at this time, screw caps have come along so far that, like, you can age a wine with a screw cap just as well as you could with a cork. Last thing, you have to think about labeling the wine, which includes the legal requirements and marketing. So that is the process of making wine as a recap. So I guess when you start in the vineyard, then we harvest the grapes, then we create juice from the grapes. We ferment the juice to create wine, then we age the wine and we bottle the wine. That's how you end up with the wine in your glass. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Cork and Fizz Guide to Wine podcast. If you loved it as much as I did, please take a second rate it. Leave a review Share it on your Instagram. Share it with another wine lover in your life. Means the world to me. In next week's episode we will be talking all about German wine with German wine importer Lisa Toupack. That Lisa has such an interesting story when it comes to how she discovered her love for wine, and she is bringing in some of the best German wines I've ever had to the us so you are going to want to tune in to that interview. Thanks again for listening. And if you want to learn more about wine, come follow me at corkandfizz on Instagram. Cheers.