The Wine Lover: How do you make wine, anyway?

In my most recent column, I discussed how rewarding it can be to make your own wine. Then I realized it might be a good idea to do a follow-up explaining in general terms some of what’s involved.
When we — the folks in my little noncommercial wine co-op, called Cave Gulch — go to harvest, we typically fill the back of a couple of pickups with bins and drive the trucks right down the middle of the rows of vines, picking as we go. If the vines are not spread far enough apart, we take smaller bins and walk down the rows to pick.
Because we can afford to be picky, we often leave any questionable fruit on the vine or just drop it on the ground. When picking, it is best to find healthy, full, tightly packed bunches of grapes with little sparseness.
Before we harvest, we check the brix and acidity of the grapes to try to harvest them at the ideal time. Brix is a fancy word for sugar content — the amount of sugar in your grapes directly relates to how much alcohol or sweetness your finished wine will have.
Once harvest is complete, we drive back to our winemaking facility (a friend’s garage) and start pitch-forking the grapes into a crusher-destemmer. Whoever created this magnificent machine is a genius. A crusher-destemmer removes the grapes from their stems and crushes them at the same time. The fruitless stems fire out one side of the machine while your juice and skins are pumped into a fermentation tank at the other end.
Once we’ve crushed all of our fruit, the fermentation tanks are full and the wine is already starting to ferment because of the natural yeast on the grapes. We also add cultured yeasts to our wine, because some yeasts are better for certain varietals.
The juice and the skins stay in contact for the entire fermentation process, because much of the flavor and color of a red wine comes from the skins. All wine actually starts out white — it isn’t until the skins are left to soak in the juice that it acquires color.
The fermentation process takes roughly a week, and by the end of it, all of the sugar in our wine will have fermented into alcohol. It is fun to taste the wine through different stages of this process. It slowly becomes more alcoholic and less sweet — plus, it is warm and still full of debris and skins.
Next, we press the juice off the skins with a basket press and pump the juice into carboys and barrels. Then we add sulfites so that bacteria won’t grow and the wine can be aged.
We barrel-age all of our red wine for at least a year in French or American oak. Some of the wine stays as a single varietal, and some we blend into a Bordeaux-style blend.
Finally, we have a bottling party and each take home 20 to 30 cases when all is said and done.
It is a rewarding hobby in many ways, although I will say it is a bit dangerous having 20-something cases of homemade wine in your garage. Be prepared to make a lot of friends. Cheers!
 Austin Twohig is a certified sommelier and partner in The Santa Cruz Experience, which conducts winery tours in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Contact him at austin@thesanta
cruzexperience.com.