The Birth of Wine
Written By: Matthew Apsokardu on Wed, Feb 25th 2009
Though wine is really nothing more than fermented grape juice—we’re excluding things like “white merlot” here, or “peach-flavored white zinfandel”—it is the result of countless hours of work in both the vineyard and winery, a deep understanding of the natural rhythms of the earth, and a careful applying of both science and art to the final product.
All wine starts in the vineyard, where growers have to decide exactly how to coax their grapes to ripeness and balance—over-ripe grapes will result in wines that tastes heavy and alcohol-y, and underripe ones will often be turned into wine that’s thin and mouth-puckeringly acidic.
Once the appropriately ripe grapes have been picked, they must be sorted—no moldy grapes in your wine, please—crushed (by hand? by machine?), fermented (with native yeasts or packaged ones?), fined or filtered (anybody want wine that has to be chewed?) aged (stainless steel tanks or oak barrels?), and bottled.
And then, finally, opened at the dinner table. Or breakfast table. Whenever: The important thing here is that when you do open the bottle, it tastes exactly like it’s supposed to. Which, with all the work that went into producing that wine in the first place, it better.