:: MCS Wine Info

Wine as an alcoholic beverage has been known since early human history. As people started to give up their nomadic lives and introduced agriculture in the Neolithic period, a number of crops began to be cultivated. The process of fermentation to produce alcohol from sugar was discovered during that time. Subsequently, a number of different ways to produce wine developed in various cultures throughout the world. The earliest surviving records of producing wine can be found in the Middle East. The first European high culture to consume wine on a large scale was ancient Greece.

One of the great propagators of consuming wine as a cultural element was the Roman Empire. Throughout the Mediterranean regions, producing wine became established, and today's well-known wine-producing regions originate from that time (e.g. France (Paris), Spain (Madrid, Barcelona), Germany, and of course Italy (Rom) itself). With the advent of Christianity, consumption of wine spread further as it was used in the celebration of Mass.

Wines can be divided primarily into red, rosé and white wines. Through human cultivation and breeding, a great variety of different grapes has been created. Vintners try to obtain special characteristics through biological hybridization. Different strains of grapes are often adapted to certain climates and types of soil, limiting them to specific regions.

The production of wine includes few basic steps. The time of harvest induces certain properties to the wine, e.g. the wine becomes sweeter and more alcoholic the more ripened the grapes are allowed to become. Once harvested, grapes are crushed to create a homogeneous mass. Traditionally, this is done by trampling them barefoot, though of course mechanical crushers are used today on an industrial scale. The stems of the grapes are usually removed at this point. For fermentation, yeast must be present. Naturally, wild yeast are already present on the surface of berries, but to produce more stable results, special yeast are added artificially in modern wine-making. Fermentation usually occurs at moderate temperatures (22-25 degrees Celsius) for red wines and slightly cooler temperatures (15-18 degrees Celsius) for white wines. Once this primary fermentation is completed, the wine is left to age under oxygen-free conditions. This alters the taste of wine in further subtle ways, and a great deal of the special characteristics of different kinds of wine are achieved at this stage. This process usually takes place in large barrels, originally made of oak but today more often made of steel.