A Truly Basic Introduction To The Major Kinds of Wine Making
Wine making is a extremely old and traditional and persons have been wine making around the world for hundreds of years. There are lots of different parts to wine making though and there are particular steps taken according to the type of wine you are making. Anyone can do wine making and there are lots of resources accessible for those learner wine makers.
The most important purpose of wine making is to convert grape juice into wine which is an alcoholic beverage. This happens because of wine yeast. The yeast requires sugar to grow and as it consumes yeast it produces alcohol. Above and beyond alcohol the yeast will also create carbon dioxide and other flavor compounds. It is the yeast that makes the wine what it is as well as all of the different smells and tastes.
White wine making is really like red wine making however there is one key dissimilarity. For white wine the juice is inoculated with yeast and then the juice is fermented into wine. The grapes skins, seeds and stems are all separated from the juice so only the juice is being made into wine. For red wine the skins of the grape are left in the juice, the yeast is added and the juice is fermented into wine. Because the grape skins are in the juice the alcohol that is being produced extracts the color from the grape skins producing a colored, or red, wine.
Sparkling wine making is slightly different as there is a secondary fermentation required. Sparkling wine making needs some specialized equipment and wine bottles as the wine is under pressure and this pressure is not relieved until you pop the cork.
Once you have still wine, the wine is put into bottles, a little bit of juice or sugar solution is added to the wine with some extra yeast. The bottles are then capped and a second fermentation happens in the bottle. The CO2 produced builds up in the bottle so that when you open the sparkling wine it fizzes.
Fortified wines also have a different type of wine making. Fortified wines are sweet wines that have high alcohol. This end product is reached by stopping the yeast fermentation so there is still plenty of sugar left. The high alcohol content comes from the addition of spirits to stop the yeast.
The major difference in these wines is how the yeast is ended. For fortified wines a spirit is added to the wine and that much alcohol will instantaneously kill the yeast. With dessert style wines the wine is quickly chilled and the yeast will stop growing. Yeast needs a special, warm temperature to grow and a too cold environment will discontinue the fermentation.
At Food and Wine World you’ll find very interesting info relating to building your own wine cellar and inexpensive wine cellar cooling systems.
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