From grape to glass

Nearly all wine grapes have clear juice. Colour, tannin and much of the flavour live in the skins. So the first and largest decision in any winery is: how long do the skins stay in contact with the juice, and at what temperature.

1. 1Pick, usually at night in warm regions to keep the fruit cold and protect aromatics.
2. 2Press immediately. The skins go straight out - this is the defining move.
3. 3Settle the juice, then ferment cool (12–18°C) to preserve delicate aromas.
4. 4Decide on malolactic conversion: allow it for a creamy, buttery texture, block it for crisp and citric.
5. 5Decide how long to leave the wine on the lees - the spent yeast that settles out after fermentation. Stirring it back through builds body and a savoury, bready depth.
6. 6Decide on oak: barrel for texture and spice, or stainless steel for purity.

1. 1Pick and destem, wholly or partly. Keeping some stems adds tannin, structure and a green herbal lift.
2. 2Ferment warm (25–30°C) with the skins. Heat extracts colour and tannin far more efficiently than cold.
3. 3Manage the cap - the raft of skins pushed to the surface by carbon dioxide - by punching it down or pumping juice over it. How often and how hard this is done is what decides how much colour and tannin end up in the wine.
4. 4Press off the skins when the extraction is judged right: days for a light red, weeks for a serious one.
5. 5Malolactic conversion happens, essentially always. It turns sharp malic acid, the acid in a green apple, into softer lactic acid, the acid in milk. It’s why red wine rarely tastes tart the way a white can.
6. 6Age in barrel or tank, then blend.

Red grapes, skins removed within hours. There are two routes. Direct press treats red grapes like white ones, and the short contact during pressing supplies all the colour: this gives the palest Provençal style. Saignée bleeds juice off a red fermentation early, which concentrates the red wine left behind. The rosé is the by-product there, and usually tastes like one.

The strangest method, and my favourite to have found out about. Whole uncrushed bunches go into a sealed tank filled with carbon dioxide. With no oxygen, the grapes start fermenting inside their own skins using their own enzymes, before yeast is involved at all.

The result is bright colour, very low tannin, and a distinctive smell of banana, bubblegum and cherry. It’s the technique behind Beaujolais Nouveau, and used in part it is behind most of the light, juicy, chillable reds around now.