Consider this your easy-to-follow, no-nonsense guide to making white wine.
What makes a white wine white? It may surprise you to hear that it’s not all about the colour of the grapes. In fact, white wines can be made from both red and white grape varieties. Take Champagne, for example. While it’s more of a lemony golden colour, the vast majority of it is actually made using red fruit – a blend of pinot noir and pinot meunier (both red grapes), alongside chardonnay (a white grape). Another cracking example is white pinot noir, AKA pinot noir blanc. This hot little number may present like a white wine, but it’s made entirely from pinot noir grapes – though not to be mistaken for pinot blanc, which is a white grape. Confusing much? Don’t stress, we’ll explain how and why below.
Because the winemaking process differs between styles, we’re tackling each of the heavy-hitters separately. So once you’ve wrapped your head around whites by reading through the below, check out our 101 on how red and rosé gets made.
Alright, enough with the chat, let’s get into it!
As they say, all good wines start in the vineyard. Without quality fruit, a winemaker is up you-know-what creek without a paddle. No different to cooking at home, right? Quality ingredients make all the difference, and given a lot of winemakers are digging that minimal intervention, hands-off approach to winemaking these days, most of the heavy lifting needs to be done before the grapes are picked.There’s a lot of talk around what this looks like, but biodynamic and organic practices are becoming increasingly popular, and you’ll often hear viticulturists talk about the importance of taking good care of the soil.
When it comes to harvest, winemakers monitor the sugar and acidity levels closely to ensure the grapes are picked at just the right time. Take riesling, for example – if winemakers are chasing a sweeter style, they’ll leave the grapes on the vine for longer. Alternatively, if they’re wanting more tartness, they’ll pick them earlier.
Once picked, the grapes are brought into the winery for processing.
This is where reds and whites differ. While both start out with clear juice, red wines get their colour, tannins and body from the skins and seeds of dark fruit. Basically, the longer the juice rests on that stuff, the richer the colour and the more pronounced those tannins and flavours become.
Generally, when it comes to making whites, the juice is immediately pressed off (AKA removed from) the skins and fermented on its own. This is to maintain that crisp, light-bodied freshness you typically get with a white wine. That said, we’ve all heard of ‘skin-contact whites’ – those delightful wines now making up huge portions of trendy wine lists and (probably) your own wine shelf. To make these wines, winemakers leave the juice to ferment on its skins, extracting colour, tannin and flavour. This is where we get the term ‘orange wine’, thanks to the golden, amber-like hue the skins leave behind.
In the case of making a white wine from red grapes, the winemaker will very gently (and immediately) press the juice straight off the skins to avoid imparting any colour whatsoever.
You know how a freshly squeezed apple juice has a cloudy appearance? It’s the same deal with wine. So, before fermentation kicks off, the juice is chilled in a tank and allowed to settle. This basically removes any solids that could make the wine taste bitter.
From here, yeast is added and fermentation begins. And just like with reds, winemakers can either use wild or commercially available yeasts, depending on the style of wine they’re chasing. Wild yeasts are generally picked up from in and around the winery, perhaps on the equipment, in the air or on the vines.
If you’ve heard the phrase “wild-yeast fermented”, this is part of a shift toward a more hands-off approach to winemaking. According to some, wild yeast offers up greater flavour, texture and better reflects the terroir, or site, from which the grapes are sourced. The downside, however, is that wild yeast is unpredictable. But not everyone sees that as a downside – after all, life (and wine) would be pretty boring without a little uncertainty. Either way, whether a winemaker opts for wild or commercial, the yeast feed off the sugar in the grapes, produce alcohol, and create wine.
For a dry white, fermentation stops once all the sugar has been eaten up. In a sweeter wine, fermentation is stopped early leaving some of that residual sugar behind.
While this isn’t relevant to all whites, it’s still worth a mention. It’s called malolactic fermentation and is an optional extra for winemakers targeting a particular style of wine.
You’ll be familiar with the effects of malo if you’re a chardy drinker and love that creamy, buttery flavour you sometimes get. It’s the result of a secondary fermentation that converts tart acids in the wine into softer, creamier acids.
After fermentation wraps, winemakers are left with a bunch of dead yeast cells, otherwise known as lees, floating around the bottom of the tank. At this point, winemakers have two options: they either age the wine on these dead yeast cells, or they don’t. If they don’t, they’ll need to remove them first, and they do that via a technique called ‘racking’.
Racking is a fancy wine term for syphoning wine off its lees, and it’s commonly used with aromatic varieties like riesling, sauvignon blanc, viognier, pinot gris and gewürztraminer. Typically winemakers want to retain the distinctive aromas of these varieties, so they choose to avoid the influence of lees ageing. Although, in saying that, all bets are off these days with winemakers pushing boundaries and experimenting in ways we haven’t seen before.
Either way, the wine will be aged – with or without its lees.
Once alcoholic fermentation has wrapped, it’s time for the wine to be aged. Ageing can occur in anything from oak barrels to stainless steel tanks, depending on the grape variety and style of wine being made.
If a winemaker does choose to age their wine on lees, they’ll use a technique called bâtonnage, which is a fancy French word for stirring settled lees back into the wine. It helps to extract as much flavour as possible and it’s done several times throughout the ageing process.
Chardonnay is the perfect player when it comes to a bit of lees ageing as it gives it body, texture and yeast-like flavours that can really take it to the next level.
