How Wine Is Actually Made

This week on The Daily Decant we're going back to basics, a week designed for anyone who's ever felt intimidated by wine, and a week that will lock in the foundational knowledge that makes everything else on the show click. Monday's episode covers how wine is actually made: the difference between red, white, and rosé, what fermentation actually does, what oak does and doesn't do, and all the other process questions that never quite get answered clearly.

Transcript

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Welcome to the Daily Decant, your five-minute briefing on the world of wine. Each episode delivers practical insights to help you choose, order, and talk about wine with more confidence in everyday social settings. Let's get into today's decant. This week is different. We've had a lot of new followers, new listeners recently, and so I wanted to take a week to kind of pause from all of the deep stuff that we've been getting into and go back to the beginning for just a couple of days. So after months of deep dives into Brolo, Burgundy, Champagne, Spain, South Africa, Cabernet Sauvignon, across four continents, this week is deliberately intentionally foundational. I'm calling it the Back to Basics week, and it's designed for two audiences. One, all you new folks to the show who want to understand the fundamentals before we head back into the deep end. And anyone who's been listening for a while and realizes there are some basic questions they've never quite gotten a clear answer to. Both groups are welcome here and both will get something out of this week. Let's start with the most basic question in wine. How is it actually made? All wine starts with grapes. Ripe grapes contain sugar, water, acids, and flavor compounds. This process of turning those grapes into wine is called fermentation, and fermentation is simpler than most people think. Yeast eats sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide as byproducts. That's it. That's the chemical reaction that makes wine. The yeast can be naturally present on the grape skins or commercially added by the winemaker, then fermentation happens in a vessel, traditionally a barrel or vat, and takes anywhere from a few days to a few weeks depending on temperatures and yeast activity. When the yeast has consumed all or most of the sugar, fermentation stops and what remains is wine. Now, the difference between red, white, and rosé, this is the one that most people half know and half don't. White wine is made from the juice of grapes only without the skins. The grapes are pressed immediately after harvest and the juice runs off clear or pale yellow. And that juice is fermented on its own. Even red grapes produce clear juice when pressed gently, which is why champagne can be made from Pinot Noir and still be white. Red wine is made by fermenting the grape juice together with the skins, seeds, and sometimes stems. That skin contact is where red wine gets its color and tannins and a significant portion of its flavor complexity. The longer the juice sits in contact with the skins, the darker and more tannic the wine. And rosé sits in between, so either the red grape juice is left in contact with the skins for a short time or a few hours to a day or two, to extract a small amount of color and tannin than separated, or occasionally, in the case of rose champagne, a small amount of finished red wine is blended into white wine. That method is an exception, not the rule. Now let's talk about oak. This is the single most discussed and most misunderstood element in wine beyond the grape themselves. Oak barrels are used to age wine and they do two things. First, they allow tiny amounts of oxygen to reach the wine over time, which softens tannins and rounds out harsh edges. Second, the wood itself imparts flavor compounds into the wine, specifically vanilla, toast, spice, and a creamy richness. New oak barrels impart more flavor than older well-used barrels, and small barrels impart more flavor per liter of wine than large ones. The skill in oak aging is knowing how much of this influence you want in the finished wine. Too much new oak in the barrel overwhelms the grape, too little and you lose the textural benefits. The move in fine wine generally has been toward less new oak and more restraint using old barrels or large format vessels to achieve the textural benefits without the heavy vanilla and toast flavors that dominated in wines in the 1990s. Tannin. This is the compound that creates a dry, grippy sensation in your mouth derived from the grape skins, seeds, and oak. And so it makes you feel like your gums are drying out after a glass of big red wine. Acid, the freshness and tartness in the wine balanced with fruit and alcohol. High acid wines feel crisp and lively. Low acid wines can feel flat or flabby. Alcohol. Produce by fermentation ranges from about 5% in a light sparkling wine to 15 or 16% in a bay warm climate red. Alcohol adds body and warmth. Base takeaway from today is that wine is fermented grape juice, and the main decisions a winemaker makes are which grapes to use, how much skin contact to allow, whether, and how long to age in oak, and when to stop fermentation. Everything else we cover on the show, every region, grape, producer, is a variation on those four core decisions. Tomorrow we'll talk about how to read a wine label so you can walk into any shop in the world and understand exactly what you're looking at. You won't want to miss it. That's today's Daily Decant. If you found this helpful, be sure to subscribe and share with your friends so you can continue building your wine knowledge in just a few minutes a day. See you tomorrow for the next decant.