How to produce wine

Ok, so you’ve decided to set up a winery, and want to know how to go about it — mind, this is no namby-pamby home-made wine stuff, but the real thing: a boutique winery.

Making wine is actually quite simple: sugar in the juice is fermented by yeast (a catalyst) into alcohol with the release of carbon dioxide. The resulting liquid has an alcohol content of 12-14 per cent (depending on how much sugar there was to start with), in addition to some unfermented sugar and food-grade acids (tartaric, citric, and malic).

Red wines also have tannins and other trace compounds: since the colour in red wine comes from the skin, these are left in the juice (‘must’) during fermentation — a shorter duration will produce wines of a lighter colour (Rose wines). This is also why red wines are rich in Resveratol, an antioxidant found in the skin of wine grapes, and which has proven health-promoting properties.

The first thing is to decide the type of wine you want to produce, and capacity you want to plan for — this will determine the quantity of grapes to be crushed and the number or size of fermentation tanks to be installed, as well as whether to have some oak casks on hand.

Let us say that you have located this supplier with 10 acres of good Shiraz grapes, and you want to produce only the best red wine possible, with about 10 per cent of the total being a ‘reserve’ wine.

The maths of winemaking is also fairly simple: one tonne of grapes will give about 675 litres of finished wine, enough to fill 900 bottles. A good vineyard will produce about four tonnes of red wine grapes per acre, so in 10 acres you’d get 40 ton grapes and produce 27,000 litres or 36,000 bottles. Not much, but enough wine to start with.

You would hence need about 45 kilolitres of wine fermentation-cum-storage tanks costing about Rs 25 Lakh, with another Rs 65 Lakh for the de-stemmer or crusher, filters, chilling plant, electricals, water system, and piping. Provide for about 5,000 sq.ft of building at Rs 1,200sq.ft and your winery should be up & running for about Rs 1.5 crore. Lay in 12 oak casks for the reserves — these will cost a staggering Rs 45,000 each — and you are all set.

Now for the timing: wine grapes are harvested in February and March in Nashik, and in March and April near Bangalore. Deciding when exactly the grapes should be harvested is tricky as both the brix (sugar level) in and ripeness of the grapes should be optimal. All grapes in India are still hand-harvested, so the quality of grapes coming to the winery can be extremely good — but this also means that even 10 acres will take seven to eight days to finish.

Making a red wine is a bit like producing a baby: both take 9 months and lots of care to be born. The fermentation of the red grape must (juice, skins and pips) should take three to four weeks, after which the sediments in the finished wine will take at least four months to settle (‘racking’). The wine can now be bottled — but best not to rush to market immediately: allow at least another four months in bottle to ‘rest’ the wine (more if you can afford it).

Making a good wine is time-consuming and labour-intensive, as much art as science, particularly in your boutique winery — so don’t expect to pay peanuts. Next time round, let’s take a look at what it takes to market and distribute your wine.

Wines I’ve been drinking: A MAN Vintners’ (Coastal South Africa) Chardonnay 2010, unusually pale, but with terrific aromas of melons and tropical fruit, and a rounded smooth medium-light palate with some butterscotch and fruit flavours. The wine is made by three leading South African vintners, who have diplomatically named the brand after the first letter in their wives’ names: Marie, Anette, and Nicky. Rated at 88 points by Wine Spectator and sold at Rs 604 duty free by importer Wine Park, this is a wine to seek out and try.

Alok Chandra is a Bangalore-based wine consultant