What is the process of making wine?

It's pretty huge actually. There is a difference between white wines, rosé, and red wines. For white wines, you are going to pick the grape and press the grape very quickly so you don't get a lot of tannin. Tannin comes from the seeds and the skin and is what sits in your mouth and kind of coats your teeth in a heavy red wine, but you don't want that in a white wine. You are trying to make sure that chardonnay tastes like chardonnay and it not hidden by all these acids. So, you gently press the grapes just to get the juice out and then you go through fermentation and you finish off with cleaning up the wine. Normally they filter it. They do some blending and then big bottle it.

For red wine, you want to have those tannins in there. So, what's you're going to do is actually split all of the grapes skins and put all of the grapes together in a big vat with the skins and some of the seeds and let it go through fermentation. Two things happen, number one you extract those tannins, which help add quality to the wine and the other thing is you are going to extract the color from the skins. The longer you let it the more red color you will get in your wine.

If I wanted to make a white wine using red grapes, I would not let it sit on the skins for any length of time. I can take a cabernet sauvignon grape, which is predominantly red, but the juice inside the grape is white. If I press it really gently I can get a white cabernet sauvignon.

That's the true difference between making red wines and white wines. With red wine, you are going to let it ferment with the skin so you extract that color. With a white wine you don't do that.

With a rosé, it gets a little interesting because there are a couple of ways you can make rosé. One of the easiest ways is to blend a red wine and white wine together to come up with this rosé color and a lot of wineries do that. You can also take your red wine grapes and let them ferment for about 36 hours on average, maybe even two days. What will happen is you extract the little of that red color out of the skin. Then you actually drain off all of the juice so the skins are left in a different area and you have the juice separate with a pink or rose tinge to it. Then you let it go through fermentation and finish it off. Therefore, you end up with a rosé wine.