How wine is made, from vineyard to bottle
Wine is fermented grape juice, which sounds simple until you see how many decisions sit between the vine and the bottle. Here is the whole route, step by step, with what each step means for the numbers on your screen.
Wine starts as a farm product
A brewery buys malt and hops that can be stored for months, so it can brew whenever demand asks for it. A winery cannot. Its raw material is ripe grapes, they arrive once a year and they start to spoil the day they are picked.
That single fact shapes almost everything else. The size of the crop sets how much wine can exist. The weather in one season sets its style. A forecast for a wine brand is really a forecast about a harvest that has already happened, or one that has not happened yet.
Nearly all wine comes from one vine species, Vitis vinifera, in thousands of varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. The grape holds what a winemaker needs: sugar for the yeast, acid for freshness, plus skins that carry colour, tannin and aroma.
In the vineyard, ripeness is the decision
As grapes ripen, sugar goes up and acidity comes down. Pick too early and the wine is thin and sharp. Pick too late and it is heavy, high in alcohol and flat. The winemaker walks the rows, tastes berries and measures sugar with a refractometer, a small handheld instrument that reads sugar in degrees Brix from a drop of juice.
In India this happens in the dry months, roughly January to March in the main growing areas. Picking usually starts at first light so the fruit reaches the winery cool. Warm grapes start fermenting on their own in the crates, which is not the plan. You can read more about where and when in our guide to India's wine regions.
Crushing and pressing
At the winery the bunches go through a destemmer, which pulls the berries off the stalks and usually splits them open. What happens next depends on colour.
For white wine the grapes are pressed straight away and only the juice is fermented. For red wine the crushed berries, skins and all, go into the tank, because the colour sits in the skins rather than the juice. Most red grapes have clear juice. The first juice that runs off without pressure is called free run. The juice squeezed out under the press is press wine, which is firmer and more tannic and is kept separate so it can be blended back in by taste.
Fermentation turns sugar into wine
Yeast eats the grape sugar and turns it into alcohol and carbon dioxide. A common rule of thumb is that about 17 grams of sugar per litre of juice gives one percent of alcohol, which is why riper grapes make stronger wine.
Whites are usually fermented cool, often somewhere around 12 to 18 °C in temperature-controlled stainless steel, to keep the fruity aromas. Reds run warmer, often in the twenties, to pull colour and tannin out of the skins. During a red fermentation the skins float up into a thick cap. The cellar team punches it down or pumps juice over it several times a day so the skins keep giving up colour.
When the yeast has eaten all the sugar the wine is dry. Stop it early by chilling and filtering, so some sweetness stays behind. Many reds and some whites then go through malolactic conversion, where bacteria turn sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid.
Ageing, clarifying and blending
New wine is cloudy with dead yeast, called lees. It is moved off the lees into clean tanks or barrels, a job called racking. Some wines are aged in oak for months or years, picking up vanilla and toast notes while a little oxygen softens the tannin. Others stay in steel to keep them crisp.
Before bottling most wines are fined and filtered to make them clear and stable. Whites are often chilled hard for a while so tartrate crystals drop out in the tank rather than in a customer's fridge. Then the winemaker blends lots, tasting tank against tank, to build a wine that fits the brand from one vintage to the next.
Bottling and why the timeline matters at your desk
A small dose of sulphur dioxide protects the wine from oxygen and microbes, then it is bottled, labelled and released. A fresh white or rosé can be on the shelf within months of harvest. A serious red can sit in the cellar for two years or more before anyone sells it.
This is the part that lands on a planner's or analyst's screen. Wine in tanks and barrels is stock that has already cost money but cannot yet be sold. Every litre lost to racking, filtration or evaporation shows up as a gap between grapes bought and cases shipped. If you want to see how each colour and style diverges from this basic route, our guide to red, white, rosé and sparkling takes it apart.
The numbers make more sense once you have smelled a tank mid-fermentation. That is hard to get from a slide deck.
Common questions
How long does it take to make wine?
Fermentation itself takes days to a few weeks. A fresh white or rosé can be bottled within months of harvest, while many reds age for a year or more before release.
Why is most wine made only once a year?
Grapes ripen once a year and cannot be stored like malt or grain. Whatever the harvest delivers is all the wine a winery can make until the next one.
Where does red wine get its colour?
From the skins. Most red grapes have clear juice, so red wine is fermented with the skins in the tank to extract colour and tannin.
What is a dry wine?
A wine in which the yeast has fermented almost all the grape sugar into alcohol, so little or no sweetness is left.
