Winemaking: Forward – to Grapes – to Countries
Image source: thespruceeats.com
| Wine predates civilization! Wine has a very long history, stretching back some 9,000 years. The received wisdom is that human civilization began in Mesopotamia (5,300 Before Present), Egypt (5,200 BP), coastal Peru (5,100 BP), the Indus Valley (4,500 BP) and China (4,200 BP). So wine appears to predate civilisation – as we know it! |
| China The first concoction of fermented rice, honey and hawthorn fruit (or possibly grapes), dates back to 7,000-6,600 BCE in China’s central plain, near the Yellow River Valley. This ‘wine’ was discovered in Neolithic early pottery at Jiahu village in Henan. The village also contained some symbols carved into tortoise shells and bones, a very early form of writing.  Red-crowned cranes – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiahu Another find was a set of flutes, carved from the wing bones of cranes, which are among the oldest playable musical instruments in the world. The village’s forty-five residences and 250 to 800 population was an advanced settlement pursuing rice and millet agriculture. The settlement was abandoned by c5,700 BCE when the site became flooded. |
| Georgia One claim to be the world’s birthplace for wine, is based upon grape wine production evidence that comes from Gadachrili Gora in Georgia, located south of Tbilisi in the Caucasus. Their winemaking process, dates from c6000 BCE, they first crushed the grapes then threw these into a pot complete with their pips, skins and stalks. This pot and the process is termed ‘qvevri’ after the egg-shaped red clay pots used for fermentation. The sediment collects in the pointed bottom of the pot leaving the wine, free from sediment, at its centre.  Qvevri – www.wineofgeorgia.co.uk/pages/georgian-wine Qvevri means ‘mother’ in Georgian, the process is on UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Today, the eastern Georgia region of Kakheti has around 80 grape varieties, Saperavi the most widely-used for red wines, Rkatsiteli for white wines. |
| Iran However, this is to some degree disputed by Iranian/Persian claims. Six two-and-a-half-gallon clay jars were discovered in the 1970s in Hajji Firuz Tepe, a Neolithic village in Iran’s northern Zagros mountains and dated to 5.400-5,000 BCE. Using spectrometry, chromatography, and chemical tests, a team from the University of Pennsylvania Museum found ‘calcium salt from tartaric acid, which occurs naturally in large amounts only in grapes. Resin from the terebinth tree was also present, presumably used as a preservative, indicating that the wine was deliberately made and did not result from the unintentional fermentation of grape juice’. (source: Archaeological Institute of America) This find extends Iran’s claim by two millennia, but still falls short of Georgia’s start-date. These two locations, Gadachrili Gora in Georgia and Hajji Firuz Tepe in Iran, are just a little over 300miles (500km) as the crow flies, on the Caucasus isthmus sat between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Iran’s city of Shiraz was a centre of wine-making for thousands of years, made famous by the Iranian poet Hafez. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 banned alcohol and shut down the vineyards and wineries. Of course it still shares its name with one of the major grape varieties, though some sources suggest there is no genetic connection between today’s Shiraz grapes and those used in Iran.  Image source: thisdayinwinehistory.com The archaeological site Hajji Firuz Tepe in Iran holds the oldest jar, discovered to contain a mixture of wine and resin. The container depicted above is held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology. |
| Winemaking: The ‘alchemy’ of wine Let’s look at what is actually involved in the process of winemaking. – beers are made from the aritifical process of brewing; – spirits from the artificial process of distillation; – wine is made by the natural process of fermentation. Wildly occurring yeasts attack fruits and convert their sugar into alcohol. It is clearly all about the grape (primarily Vitis vinifera). The grape consists of 70 to 85% water, 18 to 30% sugar (fructose and glucose) and around 2% acids (tartaric and malic), amino acids, esters, flavonoids, minerals, polyphenols proteins, tannins and vitamins. These tiny trace amounts determine the wine’s aroma, colour and flavour. Of course, winemaking is very much about the vineyard’s soil, the year’s weather and irrigation. It is then further determined by the timing and quality of the harvested grapes, particularly their skins and juices. Winemakers declare that it is perfectly possible to make bad wine from good grapes, but implausible to produce good wine from bad grapes. There are over 10,000 wine grape varieties that offer unique tastes and smells. Each contains different types of yeast, which affects the fermentation process. The colour and type of the desired wine will vary the processes, as an example, white wines are usually pressed before fermentation, red wines after. |
Winemaking: There are a series of basic steps, each with its own risks and rewards, that determine the ultimate wine that may be produced:
 Image source: learn.winecoolerdirect.com | cultivation of the grapes on the vine. This with harvesting constitutes viticulture, which depends upon the soil of the vineyard and the weather. This task includes irrigation, fertilisation and vine management to monitor its development and help determine its characteristics; |
| harvesting the grapes, timing is everything, and required judgement of the grape’s sugar, acid and tannin levels. The harvesting determines its vintage and itsmethod can impact on the outcome; | Image source: vogadorivini.it |
 Image source: vinepair.com | crushing the grapes gently allows the juice, pulp and seeds to mix with the skins and stems, and creates the must. The must may undergo chaptalisation, correction or improvement of by adding calcium carbonate to neutralize acidity, or sugar to increase alcoholic strength; |
| pressing , by hand or foot, or by machine, extracts the juice from the insoluble solid parts of the grape, while adding oxygen. Traditionally champagne, sparkling and rose wines use a whole-cluster approach to pressing. The three principal mechanical presses – belt, impulse and screw; |  Image source: wineterroirs.com |
 Image source: robbreport.com | fermentation, yeast and bacteria react with the grape sugars and converts it into ethanol or ethyl alcohol. The process creates carbon dioxide and heat which must be controlled in creating the specifics of the wine. A good fermentation converts all of the grape sugars, the riper the grape the more sugar it contains. Sulphur dioxide is often used: pre-fermentation to kill bacteria present on the skins, during fermentation to stop the yeast and permit residual sugars to create sweet wines, after fermentation to prevent oxidation and kill residual bacteria or yeasts; |
| clarification, or filtration of the must, removes dead yeast cells (the lees), bacteria, tartrates, proteins, pectins, tannins and other compounds, and the evident pieces of grape skin, pulp, stems and gums. This can involve centrifugation, filtration, fining, flotation, pasteurization and refrigeration; | Image source: grapesandgrains.org |
 Image source: winemakermag.com Image source: fruitandvine.co.uk | aging and bottling, many wines improve in quality by being placed for a time in barrels and bottles. This can alter its colour, acidity level and clarification. It can also reduce volume, creating ullage, which can be resolved by adding the same wine from another container. The bottling is the transfer of wine from large containers to individual bottles, while giving it its final filtration. The process differs for sparkling wine, which often undergoes a second fermentation in the bottle. |
