Ymbong

Wine Processing

• It all starts with grapes on the vine: and it's important that these are properly ripe. Not ripe enough, or too ripe, and the wine will suffer. The grapes as they are harvested contain the potential of the wine: you can make a bad wine from good grapes, but not a good wine from bad grapes. 

• Teams of pickers head into the vineyard. This is the exciting time of year, and all winegrowers hope for good weather conditions during harvest. Bad weather can ruin things completely. 

• Hand-picked grapes being loaded into a half-ton bin.

• Increasingly, grapes are being machine harvested. This is more cost-effective, and in warm regions quality can be preserved by picking at night, when it is cooler. This is much easier to do by machine. 

• The harvester plucks the grape berries off the vine and then dumps them into bins to go to the winery.

• These are machine-picked grapes being sorted for quality.

• Hand-picked grapes arriving as whole bunches in the winery.

• Sorting hand-picked grapes for quality. Any rotten or raisined grapes, along with leaves and petioles, are removed. 

• These sorted grapes go to a machine that removes the stems. They may also be crushed, either just a little, or completely. 

• These are the stems that the grapes have been separated from in the destemmer. 

• Reception area at a small winery. Here grapes are being loaded and then taken by conveyor belt to a tank, from where they are being pumped into the fermentation vessel. 

• This is where red wine making differs from whites. Red wines are fermented on their skins, while white wines are pressed, separating juice from skins, before fermentation. 

• The red grapes have been foottrodden, and fermentation has begun naturally. These men are mixing up the skins and juice by hand: this process is carried out many times a day to help with extraction, and also to stop bacteria from growing on the cap of grape skins that naturally would float to the surface.

• Sometimes cultured yeasts are added in dried form, to give the winemaker more control over the fermentation process. But many fermentations are still carried out with wild yeasts, naturally present in the vineyard or winery.

• These red grapes are being fermented in a stainless steel tank. During fermentation, carbon dioxide is released so it is OK to leave the surface exposed. Sometimes, however, fermentation takes place in closed tanks with a vent to let the carbon dioxide escape.

• An alternative to punch downs is to pump wine from the bottom of the tank back over the skins.

• Here, fermenting red wine is being pumped out of the tank, and then pumped back in again. The idea is to introduce oxygen in the wine to help the yeasts in their growth. At other stages in winemaking care is taken to protect wine from oxygen, but at this stage it's needed.