Wine · Production
How wine is made: from grape to bottle
Every wine style comes from a handful of decisions. Learn the steps and you can explain why wines taste the way they do.
1. Harvest and sorting
Grapes are picked by hand or machine when sugar, acidity and flavour are right. They are sorted to remove leaves and damaged fruit.
2. Crushing and pressing
- White wine: grapes are usually pressed first, and the juice alone is fermented, so there is little colour or tannin.
- Red wine: crushed grapes ferment together with their skins, which supply colour and tannin. The wine is pressed afterwards.
- Rosé: black grapes spend a short time on their skins, then the juice is fermented like a white wine.
3. Fermentation
Yeast converts sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Temperature matters: cooler fermentations keep fresh fruit aromas; warmer ones extract more from red skins. If fermentation is stopped early or the grapes are very sweet, some sugar remains and the wine is sweeter.
4. Maturation
- Stainless steel or concrete: keeps fruit flavours fresh and neutral.
- Oak: adds flavours such as vanilla and toast, and lets small amounts of oxygen in, which softens tannin. New oak adds more flavour than old.
- Malolactic conversion: turns sharper malic acid into softer lactic acid and can add a creamy note.
- Lees ageing: contact with dead yeast cells adds body and a bready or creamy character.
5. Clarifying and bottling
Wine is fined or filtered to remove particles, sometimes with a small addition of sulfur dioxide to protect against oxidation, then bottled and closed with a cork, screwcap or other closure.
Questions to practise
- Why is red wine usually more tannic than white?
- What is the difference between oak flavour and oak maturation?
- Why might a producer stop a fermentation early?
Note: this is a general study guide written in our own words, not WSET's syllabus. For what is examined, always check WSET's published specification and your course provider.
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