Although there's a lot of hype and mystery in the world of wine, actually creating wine is an incredibly simple, four step process.

1) Grow some fruit (to be honest, any kind of fruit will do, but 99.99% of the wine world uses grapes)
2) Harvest & press the fruit to release the juice
3) Ferment the juice
4) Drink

Step #3 is where the magic happens. Tiny, one cell organisms that naturally live on the skins of fruit and in the air will set up camp in the juice and start devouring all of the sugar that resides there. While feasting on the sugars, the yeast cells yield two by-products, carbon dioxide and alcohol. The carbon dioxide bubbles up and gets released into the air, resulting in wine. The amount of alcohol in a wine is directly related to how much sugar was in there to begin with. The riper the grapes, the more alcoholic a wine can be. This is why wines from hot, sunny locations such as California and Australia, generally have a higher alcohol content than cooler climates such as France.

Although anybody with a tub of grapes can produce wines, there are countless variables that can change the final outcome of this process. Professional wine makers have available a wide range of techniques to influence the final flavors of their wines.

From clean stainless steel containers to wooden barrels for aging, professional wine-making yeasts, the type of grapes used, the length of time taken to ferment the juice, the soil that the grapes are grown in, and even the weather in the vineyard, will all change the final outcome of a batch of wine.