I feel like that title is apt for the first real article. Wine 101 I guess. Anyway, I guess we gotta start somewhere. Let’s just start at the most basic spot and build from there.
Wine is fermented grape juice. Actually scratch that, wine is fermented fruit juice. Most of what we commonly refer to as “wine” is fermented grape juice, but you can make wine out of any fruit. Peaches, strawberries, there’s a place on Long Island that even makes blueberry port, which I personally find to be horrifying, but perhaps its great and I’m just an asshole. Or perhaps I’m giving them too much credit. Or both, who knows.
“But hold on a second, what about apples? Isn’t fermented apple juice called cider?” Yea I just thought the same thing. According to the internet apple wine is a thing, but it requires a higher alcohol content. I think cider is lower around 4 – 6 % or something, whereas wine made from grapes (which we will refer to as ‘wine’ from now on) can be anywhere from like 3 to 17 percent. At or above 17 percent it’s considered fortified wine. I’ll talk about that more below. “Wait but didn’t you say cider isn’t called apple wine because it’s 4-6 % alcohol, but then afterwards you said wine can be in that same range?” Yea sure I guess I did but shut up, I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
So the most common wines you’ve heard of are probably white, red, rose and sparkling. Generally speaking, white wine is made by harvesting white grapes, pressing the juice out of them and then fermenting this juice. Red wine is traditionally made by harvesting the red grapes, then either de-stemming (taking the berries off of the grape cluster) the fruit or leaving the entire grape cluster intact, then dumping this fruit into a fermentation vessel.
“But sire, whence comes the scarlet hue of the blood of Christ?”, you may ask as the steadfast squire you are, eager to please your unplacatable knight. Well, it usually comes from the skins. There are grapes whose bread flesh is red in addition to its skin (these are called “teinturier”), but for the most part the bread flesh of red grapes is more or less clear. Naturally, there are a variety of techniques used to extract color, flavors and nutrients from the skins of red grapes during fermentation.
On to #RoseAllDay. There are a couple different ways of making rose, but for now we’ll just say that you use red grapes to make white wine. So you treat red grapes like you would white grapes. Press them and ferment the juice. Certain roses have more color than others which is due to different types of grapes being used, but you also get some color from the skins. Winemakers will usually lightly crush the grapes, then have the grape juice spend a little bit of time with the skins. We’ll go more into that another time.
Sparkling wine is a whole separate thing. There are a bunch of ways you can make it, but the basic idea is that you make a wine that has a bunch of carbon dioxide in it. One way of doing that is by letting the wine ferment completely, bottling it, then adding yeast and sugar into the bottle. Slap a crown cap or cork on that and let it ferment again in bottle. Done. Another way of doing it is by simply injecting a bunch of carbon dioxide into the finished wine. Sounds like cheating? I don’t know, it kind of is. Seems like a glorified sodastream to me. Anyway, there are a few more ways that it’s traditionally done but that’s the general idea.
Now let’s get to some lesser-known wines. Fortified wine is wine where “neutral grape spirit” (AKA brandy) is added at some point during production. Brandy is distilled wine. Since wine can be made out of any fruit, you can have brandy made out of any fruit. In order to make fortified grape wine they use grape brandy. The point at which you add the brandy depends on what kind of fortified wine you want to make. Port, for example, is made by adding brandy before the fermentation is over; this halts the fermentation, leaving sugar in the wine (referred to as residual sugar or RS). Sometimes brandy is added after fermentation is over, like when making Marsala.
Ah yea that’s right, sweet wines are a separate deal. Well-made sweet wines*. I’m not talking about yellow tail or barefoot or other swill that’s sweet because they’ve added sugar. Eh I’m sorry, I guess that’s kind of mean. The redeeming characteristic of those is that they can be the good kind of gateway drug. I assume people drink that due to ignorance, because you can find much, much better/well-made wine for the same price. (Whatever “better/well-made” actually means is completely up for debate, I suppose. That’s a furious op-ed which is most certainly on its way.) That, or people genuinely prefer the taste of it to other wine. But in that case I’d argue you should just save yourself some money and buy Kirkland-brand sports drink (or mountain dew if it’s a special occasion) and mix it with vodka that comes in a plastic bottle. I promise I’m not trying to be an asshole, I seriously think it would taste better AND be cheaper. Anyway, like other styles of wine, real, well-made sweet wines are produced in a lot of different ways. We’ll address this in another post, but the reason they’re sweet is because the fermentation is stopped before it’s complete. In most cases this happens either because the fermentation reaches an alcohol content at which the yeast can no longer survive, or the winemaker decides to lower the temperature of the fermentation until the yeast become dormant. Some of these fermentations can take a reeaaallyy long time. Tokaji essencia can take up to 8 years.
In conclusion, that’s all for now. We’ll go into detail on all of these as time goes on. Now you have a general idea of how most of it is made, so next time you go into a wine shop hopefully things will make a little more sense! And I guess that’s really what this whole thing is about. Thanks for reading.
Cork Taint 