Wine comes out of a bottle, yeah?

Well, that’s one way of looking at it but a better one is to turn your thinking around to how did this wine get into the bottle? Where is it from? How was it made? Who made it?

Now don’t worry, I’m not going to get too technical here. I just think it’s a good idea to know a bit more about the stuff you’re swallowing.

Wine is made by adding yeast to a vat of grapes or grape juice depending which style/colour of wine you’re making. The yeast eats the sugar and converts it into alcohol and CO2. Roughly, for every 17 grams of sugar per litre in the juice, you get about 1% alcohol. Therefore the higher the sugar content the higher the alcohol level in the finished dry wine.

Small, independent wine makers follow the fermentation process in exactly the same way as the factory and co-operative producers, but that’s where the similarity ends.

In a factory situation everything is regulated, it needs to be. They are working with huge quantities, using stainless steel tanks each containing thousands of litres, possibly 100,000 or more. If anything goes wrong with a vat containing that much wine they’ve lost nearly 140,000 bottles. So nothing is left to chance. The wine is controlled to the nth degree so that it finishes on time and in a style the factory intended.

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