Back to Basics: After Fermentation… What Happens Next?
Congratulations, your fermentation is complete! The yeast did their job, and your grape juice has successfully turned into wine. So what happens next? There are a number of basic processes a wine...
View ArticleBack to Basics: Transferring Wine to Tank or Barrel
Transferring to tank or barrel At this stage, the fermented juice is drained from its fermentation tank, leaving behind most of the solids such as bits of grape skin and spent yeast cells. The wine is...
View ArticleBack to Basics: Barrel-Aging a Wine
Barrel-aging You have a lot of choices when it comes to the type of oak barrels in which you age your wine. First there’s the type of oak: There are hundreds of types of oak tree! Each has a slightly...
View ArticleBack to Basics: Aging Wine Sur-Lie or Lees Stirring
Aging Sur-Lie or Lees Stirring Lees are tiny, particulate bits of matter in the wine — bits of grape skin, pulp, tartrates, and mostly the leftover, spent yeast cells from the fermentation. Sometimes...
View ArticleBack to Basics: Racking a Wine
Racking This process involves another transfer of the wine, from one container to another. Often, wines will simply be racked from one barrel into another of the same type. This seemingly small step...
View ArticleBack to Basics: Fining and Filtering a Wine
Fining and/or filtering Even if you racked your wine multiple times, there will still be tiny, invisible particles floating around in it. (If you didn’t rack, the particles may in fact be visible.) You...
View ArticleBack to Basics: Bottling a Wine and Bottle-Aging
Bottling Most of the time, this is done with a bottling line, a mechanical system that pours the wine into clean bottles, then seals them with a cork or capsule and finishes the process by attaching a...
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