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The path of wine: from vineyard to glass

How grapes from the vine become wine in a glass: pruning, harvest, pressing, fermentation, ageing and bottling. Fourteen steps from the vineyard to the table.

  1. 🌿 Vineyard — In Champagne, wine may be made only from vines in their third leaf; the average plot is ~0.12 ha, ~280,000 plots in all.
  2. 🌿 Vine pruning — Winter dry pruning removes 80–90% of one-year-old wood; an unpruned vine can carry over 400 buds.
  3. 🌿 Grape ripeness — Sugar is measured in °Brix: 18–24 °Brix is usually wanted; harvest pH is 3.1–3.3 for whites, 3.3–3.5 for reds.
  4. 🌿 Grape harvest — In Champagne, picking is by hand only, with ~120,000 pickers; in the Douro it runs from late August to mid-October.
  5. 🍷 Pressing (wine) — White: the juice is separated from the skins at once; red: pressed after fermenting on the skins. Champagne: ≤ 102 L of base wine from 160 kg.
  6. 🍷 Alcoholic fermentation — Yeast turns sugar into alcohol and CO₂; Prosecco: ~18 °C for 15–20 days.
  7. 🍷 Malolactic fermentation — Bacteria (mostly Oenococcus oeni) turn malic acid into lactic acid; 18–22 °C.
  8. 🍷 Oak barrel — Sherry: 600 L American oak butts, ≥ 2 years; Champagne: ≥ 15 months from tirage.
  9. 🍷 Clarification of wine — Bentonite binds haze-forming proteins: wine has 10–300 mg/L of protein, the bentonite dose is 60–1800 mg/L.
  10. ⚙️ Filling line — Only clear, stable wine is bottled; the EU allows 8 sizes for still wine, from 100 to 1500 mL.
  11. 🍷 Cork (stopper) — Cork oak bark: first stripped at a girth of ≥ 70 cm (~25 years), then no more often than every 9 years.
  12. 🍷 Wine cellar — 10–16 °C, classically ~13 °C, swings of no more than ±1–1.5 °C; corked bottles lie on their side.
  13. 🍷 Wine shop — Poor storage along the supply chain is the most common cause of lost quality.
  14. 🍷 Wine glass — Reds at 15–18 °C, most whites and rosés at 4–10 °C.

Themes

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