Video:See How Wine Is Made

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Transcript:See How Wine Is Made

Hi! This is Cesar Baeza from Brotherhood, America's oldest winery, here for About.com.

Wine Grapes and the Vineyard

Wines start at the vineyard. And the wine making start at the vineyard. Because first we have to find the right place to plant the grapes to grow the wines that you want to make. You want to select the time when you pick the grapes. They're dumped in the auger there.

White Wine Grapes and Wine Making

For white wines, we crush the grapes it goes through the destemmer, and then the juice fall down. And then from that point, that's what you call must. Crushed grapes but still with the skin. From here it's pumped into the dejiucer, to the juice comes into these tanks and then the conveyers takes the grapes into the press. And a the juice fall down.

Then you open and allow the skins to fall down and we take the skins out. So that is for the white wines. You press it immediately, you crush and press.

Red Wine Grapes and Wine Making

For the red wines, we put the grapes in the destemmer, take the wine from the bottom, and it goes into the rotating tanks. We put all the grape, with the skin, in it. And we start the fermentation there - keep in contact with the skin, with the juice, that you get the color. And normally we leave it for about 2-3 weeks, depends on the grape variety of the wines that we're making. And they ferment under pressure.

Carbon dioxide helps to extract the color and the flavors of the grapes. Once we decide to take it off the skin we put the juice into the fermenters. The fermentation tanks, that we ferment the juice, different wines that fermented.

Racking the Wine

Yeast converts sugar into alcohol - produce heat. So you have to control that by chilling the juice so the flavors are retained and they don't go away, evaporate. We keep it here for about a month or two months, depending on how long the fermentation takes.

And we do a racking. What's called a lees is a sediment that stays in the bottom. We rack it from the high valve, so that's how we get the clear juice. We put the wines at 28 degrees Fahrenheit, for about three weeks. And that forms the crystals - potassium tartrate that deposit, and they form those crystal.

Filtering the Wine

So we filter the wine and we remove those tartrate. This is a filter press. That's where you filter the wine that goes through the process of removing each one of these, is a filter that goes together. Then it goes through another filtration before bottling which goes through each one of these filters. This filter is very fine filtration, and from there, we have two possibilities. From there, wine goes right into the bottle for the white young wine that doesn't need aging. For the red wine, we go from here now after we stabilize we go down in the cellar where we're going to see the barrel aging of the wine. And that might stay anywhere from six months to two years in those French oak barrels.

Casking the Wines

We keep the wine in this cask for to do the malactice fermentation because it requires a special temperature and condition. To have the bacteria convert the malic acid to lactic acids and that way we put it in this cask. And that's how we have what you call the cuvet -which is a base wine, with high acidity low alcohol. And that's why we want to soften the wine before it goes into the bottle.

Aging the Wines

For the white wine six months, a the red wine, you leave it sometimes a year or two years and then you have a blending which also blends different things to give the flavor of the wine. That's the last part. We make over 25 different wines. And it's like cooking. Besides the science, you have the art.

Thank you for watching, to learn more visit us on the Web at About.com.