From sparklers to something stronger, it’s all in the process

HOW IS WINE MADE?

Wine is fermented grape juice, but there’s a bit more to it than that. For a start, there’s a difference between red, white and rosé wines. And then there’s sparkling and fortified wines, but let’s look at still table wines first.

It all starts in the vineyard when the grape crop reaches optimum ripeness; it needs to have enough sugar to ferment but it also needs to have another kind of ripeness – phenolic ripeness – meaning all the flavour and colour compounds are properly ready to make wine.

When the grapes are ripe in both senses, they get picked: sometimes by hand but mostly mechanically. Then they get crushed. White wine grapes will usually have the juice drained off the skins very rapidly; rosé or pink wines get their colour because the juice and skins are left in contact just long enough to extract it.

Red wines are fermented skins and all and there’s a special fermentation technique called maceration carbonique to make very juicy, easy-drinking wines. Essentially it involves the grapes being fermented whole and uncrushed. Grapes, like any other fruit, contain sugar. Yeast converts that sugar into alcohol and produces carbon dioxide. As someone in the industry once put it to me ‘yeast eats sugar, pees alcohol and farts CO2!’.

MAKING IT FIZZ

Sparkling wines, like Prosecco, Cava and Champagne, have to be made in a way that captures bubbles of carbon dioxide. There are several ways of doing this, but you need two fermentations: one for the alcohol, a second one for the fizz. In Champagne and Cava, for example, the secondary fermentation happens in the bottle. This used be called the methode Champenoise but now – because Champagne producers are a sensitive and litigious lot – it’s referred to as the methode traditionelle. n Try this for the methode traditionelle: Graham Beck Sparkling ks, South Africa. (€N7.5M, Marks & Spencer) n

It’s much cheaper to employ the same idea but on a much bigger