Red Winemaking

This can be your handy guide to the process of making a Not Yet Named red wine — so you can think ahead to the votes that might be coming along. Of course, you’ll need to imagine yourself knee-deep in grapes, with vistas of rolling hills and a balmy late-summer sun to set the scene.

Wine Folly remains the benchmark for infographics that hit the basics on the head

Grape Selection

Choose your grapes. Obviously, a lot goes into the vineyard long before we get involved. That’s a whole new subject I’d love to explore with you one day — but grape selection is where we tend to start the democratic winemaking process!

Our next vintage (2025) is in Piedmont, Italy, with 3 local options on the table. Nebbiolo is serious, complex, and built to age. Barbera is juicy, fresh, and vibrant. Dolcetto is darker, softer, and full of charm. The variety we choose influences everything that follows, as a result, this is often the most significant decision. Some grapes can be very versatile — like Syrah or Cabernet Sauvignon — and you can really influence the wine through winemaking. Others will create certain flavours no matter what you do. Ultimately for us, every vintage is different.

Picking Date

When the grapes are approaching maturity (judged by a mix of taste, sugar levels, and acidity), they’re sampled frequently and picked at the right moment according to the intended style. Whether we pick by hand or machine, timing is everything — it affects flavour, balance, and structure.

It’s also rarely a decision we get to make! We only make a few barrels, so we’ll usually pick alongside the rest of the vineyard when the picking crew are available and the (biggest) stakeholders are happy with the sugar/acid/flavour levels. We were fortunate enough to do it once though, in Portugal. Read about it — and the info that informed the decision by clicking on that blog.

Destemming

Preparing the grapes usually comes down to two things: crushing and destemming.
Whole bunch has been a Not Yet Named staple over the years — in Chile, California, and South Africa we’ve left a few stems in there. There’s a lot more detail to this vote — from simply whether you actually taste those stemmy flavours, all the way to the detail of how it affects fermentation kinetics.

Using Yeast for Flavour and Alcohol

You need yeast to make wine. These small, sugar-loving terriers consume the sugars found in grapes and make alcohol with carbon dioxide as a by-product — but most importantly, they unleash and transform aroma/flavour precursors into the myriad of non-grape flavours found in wine. This is the magic.

The yeasts come either from a commercial packet (as with bread), or just exist in the cellar or on the grapes — not to mention a few skilful techniques in between and we’ve done a LOT of them.

Extraction — What Makes Wine Red

Pumpovers and punchdowns are two ways of mixing the grape skins (where the colour-provding anthocanins are) with juice during fermentation — it extracts colour, as well as flavour and tannin from the skins. Crucially, this mixing is what makes the wine red. It’s also where we can begin to influence whether a wine becomes light and elegant or deep and punchy.

Pumpovers involve drawing juice from the bottom of the tank and spraying it over the top. Punchdowns are manually pushing the cap of skins down into the juice to mix. Some methods are gentler, others more aggressive — it’s all about managing the amount of extraction desired.

There are extra nuances here too: how many times a day we do this, how long each time, and for how many days. Temperature control during fermentation is also key, because it affects the rate of extraction significantly.

Pressing

After fermentation, red wine is drained from the skins — this is the free-run juice, typically softer and more elegant. The remaining skins are then gently pressed to extract extra wine, often richer and more tannic. We can blend some of this pressed juice back in for structure, but too much can overpower delicacy.

Maturation

Barrel or tank — if barrel, the options are endless. And now, more and more materials and vessel shapes are back in fashion: eggs, plastic, concrete, amphorae, clay. I’m leaving the bathtub days behind me though. This step is all about micro-oxidation through tiny pores, or placing the wine in a completely inert environment.

Malolactic fermentation as in the infogrpahic above pretty much always happens in reds, and mostly during maturation — it’s a much more interesting vote for the whites we make.Whilst the wine is resting post-harvest, it’s time to turn our attention to naming the wine and designing the label.

Blending

This is where science can’t help much! It’s all based on taste — mixing potions to create the perfect cocktail.

It’s never guaraneed, but if timing and logistics work out, this is where school trip students get to taste their wine and make adjustments by blending components together.

Fining & Filtration

Winemakers fine and filter wine to improve clarity, stability, and texture — but it’s also about preventing faults. By removing leftover yeast, bacteria, or other microbes, we reduce the risk of unwanted fermentation or spoilage in bottle. It’s a way of polishing the wine while helping ensure it stays clean and sound for longer.

This isn’t always a vote that makes it into our system. Sometimes we can avoid fining and/or filtering — if our collaborating winery is experienced in it and has shipped their wines safely around the world. But I’m generally going to be a bit risk-averse here. Either way, we’ll always keep you in the loop.

Bottling

Then we put it in the bottle of your choosing and seal it with a few options for closures. Tthe traditional natural cork or modern risk-free screw cap are classic votes, but, you guessed it, there are a load more optionn in between that will affect how the wine ages in bottle.

So that’s your whirlwind overview of how red wine is made — a foundation to help you understand the journey. There’s loads more detail and learning to be had at each decision point. We have to apply all this to the specifics of the year: the grapes we’ve got, the weather that vintage, the available equipment and the way the juice tastes in the moment.

Sit back, watch the votes roll in, and choose the path we take!