What Is Vinification?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- What is Vinification, anyway?
- Making White Wine
- Making Red Wine
- Making Sparkling Wine and Other Wine Styles
Vinification is the proper term for winemaking, and although the definition is straightforward, the process of turning juice into an alcoholic beverage is anything but simple. Let’s talk about vinification and unravel what happens in the fermentation tank.
Although vinification is commonly used when discussing wine made from grapes, it also applies to other types of fruit juice. Vinification is an art and a science, and it takes years to master — still, the biochemical transformation is as old as humanity! Let’s learn more about this ancient art because all your favorite drinks are based on it!
What is Vinification, anyway?
Vinification is not something you do but something that happens. Leave a sweet liquid unattended, and ambient yeast will turn it into an alcoholic beverage in a few days. Yeast is everywhere, and once it finds its way to fermentable sugars, the microscopic fungi are unstoppable.
Humanity learned from nature and replicated vinification at least 8,000 years ago, and grape juice soon proved to be the perfect means to an end. Now, people study for years the art of turning grape juice into wine, but the basics are still the same — let the yeast do its thing.
Making White Wine
When making white wine, the grapes are picked and sent to the winery; they are then crushed and pressed to separate the sweet juice from their skins and other solids. The clear liquid is ready for yeast, and winemakers can add their own select yeast strain or let ambient yeast take control.
After vinification, also known as fermentation, the juice is no longer juice but wine, and after being clarified, stabilized and filtered, it’s ready to be bottled. Some wine styles require winemakers to age the wine in oak barrels to gain complexity, but that’s only sometimes the case.
Making Red Wine
Making red wine starts like the white vinification process. The team picks the grapes and sends them to the winery. The grapes are crushed and sent to a fermentation vat, this time with grape skins, seeds and all. The skins play a critical role in red wine vinification, as it is in the skins where the color, tannins and aromatic molecules are found.
The name of the game is maceration and extraction. Leaching all that flavor, textural particles and color from the skins determines how dark and concentrated the wine is. For red wine, malolactic fermentation is always encouraged (it is now rare in white wine.) Here, bacteria turn harsh malic acid into mild lactic acid. The rest is time spent in oak barrels, where the wine gains aromatic complexity.
Making Sparkling Wine and Other Wine Styles
Sparkling wine is quite complicated, but it always starts with white wine vinified regularly. The wine then experiences a second vinification with more yeast and sugar, whether in a bottle or a pressurized tank; since the carbonic gas produced during fermentation has no place to go, the wine absorbs it.
Finally, sweet wine is often made with overripe grapes with excess sugar. Some of that sugar persists even after fermentation, resulting in a sweet libation. Of course, we have fortified wines made with a splash of grape spirit and other types of wine, like rosé, but we’ll talk about them some other time. Vinification is exciting, isn’t it?
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