Wine 101
The Basics of Wine
If you have ever felt like wine was totally overwhelming, you are not alone! Wine is actually very simple and just like most topics, if you build a good foundation and slowly tackle small topics, you can become an expert in no time.
So let’s start at the beginning…..what is wine?! Simply put, wine is fermented grape juice. That’s it! You take grapes, you smash them to squeeze out all the juice, and then add yeast. The yeast eats the natural sugar in that grape juice and the bi product is alcohol. It’s that simple! (Well kindof.)
To really break down wine, it’s best to start with grapes. There are thousands of different varieties of grapes. You’ve probably heard of ‘Chardonnay’, ‘Sauvignon Blanc’, ‘Merlot’, and so many more. These are varietals and simply put, are the different kinds of grapes. The best way I like to explain grape varietals is by using apples as an example. Honeycrisp, fiji, granny smith, and golden delicious are all apples, but they’re different kinds or varieties of apple. They each have different colors and different flavors, and grapes are the same way. They all come from the same genus plant, but they’re all just slightly different tasting, which makes the finished wines taste different from one another.
Now you won’t find chardonnay or merlot grapes in your grocery store. The grocery store grapes you eat are not the same grapes we use to make wine. The grapes used to make wine are actually from a different species of grape than your typical American grocery store grape and they come from a species of grape plant called Vitis Vinifera. Native to Europe and parts of Asia, this plant species has been transplanted all over the globe to grow these delicious grape varieties for making wine in other places like the US, South America, Australia and more.
It doesn’t mean you can’t make wine from grocery store grapes because, in theory, you can. But, no one really does because it doesn’t taste good. These grapes just don’t have enough sugar to convert into alcohol, so you end up adding a lot of additives and sugar to try and make it taste decent. We use those American grocery grapes to make jellies and jams and to put in our kids school lunches, and that’s about it.
Photo borrowed from Pinterest
Now these wine growing grape vines, Vitis Vinifera, are not grown everywhere. The plant thrives best in temperate climates where it isn’t too hot or too cold year round. If you look at the map to the right, you’ll see shaded areas that represent the 30th-50th parallels in both the northern and southern hemispheres. These regions are where vitis vinifera grows the best and includes a lot of famous wine growing regions like France, Spain, Italy, California, New Zealand, the bottom of South America, and Australia. For more details on why grapes grow best in these climates, be sure to listen to my Podcast Episode #2 - Wine 101 for additional details!
So we know what grapes are used to make wine, but what about the wine making process?
Well, once the grapes are harvested, they are crushed in a large vat to smash out all of that sugary, delicious juice. Now when you crush the grapes, you have to separate the juice from the skins, seeds, pulp, and any sticks or stems that may be leftover. BUT, this stage of the winemaking process is really interesting in how each winemaker chooses to separate the grape matter from the juice. Some wine makers will leave the skins and other material in contact with the juice for a few hours during the crushing process, so that they can impart flavor into the wine. (If you’ve ever heard someone talk about “tannins”, these are actually an organic substance found on grape skins that will create a bitter or astringent taste in the finished wine. Some winemakers don’t like this flavor at all, so they will quickly try to separate the juice from the skins to prevent any bitterness entering the wine. But, some winemakers, for example most Cabernet Sauvignon makers, want this bold flavor! They love the structure and bitterness these tannins bring and will actually churn the juice with the skins to agitate the particles off of the grape skins and impart flavor into the juice before separating it from the grape material.
Did you know that there are actually naturally occurring yeasts in the air? Early winemaking occurred when large vats of grape juice were left uncovered out in the fields. Over a few days time, natural yeast in the air would land in the juice and begin the fermentation process. (We don’t do this as much anymore because a lot can go wrong like getting bacteria and other things in the juice, which will make it spoil and taste awful. Now we use biologically controlled yeast strains and add them to the juice, but it’s still a fun history fact!)
In addition to flavor, the color of the finished wine is also impacted by this skin exposure. If you think about sun tanning, the longer you sit outside, the darker you get. So, the longer the juice is in contact with the skins, the more pigments it will pick up from the skin and the darker the color of the juice. So yes, the longer the juice sits on the skins, the richer the color will be, but remember that it will also continue to pick up the bitterness and astringency from those tannins and other organic materials. So winemakers really have to know what they want their finished wine to taste like and balance the process to get the flavors they want in their wine. There isn’t one “right” or “wrong” way here, it’s all about preference. You may love the way a certain winemaker produces their wine and hate another. It’s completely personal preference and the winemakers just hope that they understand enough about the consumers that they can sell their product!
After the juice is separated from the other material, the juice has to be fermented to turn it into alcohol. And remember that the way we are going to ferment it is by adding yeast. There are thousands of different kinds of yeast out there, so the winemaker will choose the yeast strain that they think will make the best wine. The yeast will eat the sugar in the grape juice and give off 3 things in the chemical process - heat, CO2, and alcohol. The yeast will continue to eat more and more of the sugar until all of the sugar is gone and the yeast dies. Yeast is a living organism, so without food (or sugar in this case), it cannot survive. Now, if a winemaker wants their wine to be sweet, then they can’t let the yeast eat all of the sugar. So, in this case, they will actually kill the yeast by heating it before it has a chance to eat all of the sugar and convert it to alcohol. It is also in this step that the winemaker decides what they want the %ABV, or percent of alcohol by volume, to be. Remember that as the yeast eats the sugar, it converts it into alcohol. So, the more sugar it eats, the more alcohol is created. This means that you can usually assume that if a wine has low alcohol that it will be very sweet and sugary. And similarly if your wine has high alcohol, then the yeast ate all of the sugar and it is probably a very dry wine.
After the wine is fermented, it will be aged and bottled. Some wines are aged in wooden barrels while others are aged in glass bottles or stainless steel tanks. The aging process is determined by the winemaker, based on the flavor profile they are hoping the finished wine will represent. For example, a lot of California Chardonnays are aged in oak barrels because it gives the wine a buttery, toasted, vanilla flavor. Some people don’t care for this flavor so they prefer stainless steel aged chardonnay which tends to be more crisp, light, and refreshing.
If you’ve ever been to a wine tasting where someone said “Oh, I can taste the lemon in this wine.” or “this wine has notes of smoke and tobacco.”, then you may be wondering what stage of the process these things are added into the grape juice. I hate to disappoint you, but these things are not actually IN the wine! Wine is 100% grape juice and unlike with beer and spirits, these things are not added into the wine to give it that flavor. The flavors that are being described “lemon, smoke, tobacco, black pepper, violets, stone, etc” are simply descriptors that are used to help differentiate one wine from another. Some of these flavors do actually come from the properties of the grapes themselves. Some grapes are sweeter, some are more acidic and tart or sour. Remember back to the example of apples. A granny smith apple is tart and sour, but a golden delicious apple is sweeter, right? And when you think about something tart and sour like Granny Smith apples, you probably think of lemons that make you pucker and almost feel acidic on your teeth.
So when a wine taster says they are picking up on lemon in the wine, what they’re saying is that they can taste sour, tart characteristics that remind them of a lemon. What the taster is trying to do is relate the flavors in the wine to some other flavor in their memory so that they can differentiate this wine from others. Now some of the flavors in the wine can actually come from environmental factors as well. For example, a wine may have salinity (or the taste of salt/ saline) if the vines are located near salt water like along a coastal region. Or a wine may taste like certain minerals from the earth or soil in that region.
As a new wine taster, it can be difficult to pick up on a lot of these characteristics, so don’t feel left out if you have no idea what a sommelier or advanced wine taster is picking up on. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of comparative tasting to learn how to pick out flavor profiles in wines. I’ll create a lot of future content about tasting wines and picking up on some of these characteristics, but for now, just know that wines are made from grapes and these descriptions are simply used to help us distinguish between wines.
That was a lot of info, but I hope it was helpful in getting a basic foundation for understanding what wine is! I promise there’s a lot of great content coming your way, so if you haven’t subscribed to my newsletter yet, be sure to sign up below so that you will never miss a new blog post or podcast drop!