Wine Making Tricks – Fermenting White Wine on the Skins vs. the Conventional Way of Wine Making

White wines are typically pressed as whole clusters and then just the juice ferments and the skins and stems are discarded. There are several options to destem white grapes and leave the juice in contact with the skins for a while, which can add palate weight, and flavor to the wine. Then there is the rare situation where you destem the grapes and ferment the wine in contact with the skins all the way through fermentation. This will likely yield a wine that is a bit too bitter but this wine can be successfully used to enhance both red and white wines when blended in. Here’s a closer look at both processes.

Destemming the Grapes and Letting Them Soak with the Skins

As Crushpad Chief Winemaker Michael Zitzlaff points out, white grapes allow multiple ways of processing, each yielding a very distinct result. Most plans involve whole cluster pressing or destemming and crushing – “The concept is that with the whole cluster press and the press you get a nice, clean, very soft and elegant juice. [...] But if you want to produce something with a little more complexity, some oil, some real rowan-like character and some silky, satin palate texture, you really want to try some different things,” Zitzlaff explains.

Squashing the berries gently and letting them sit over night for 6 to 8 hours at about 48 degrees Fahrenheit (about 10 degrees Celcius) gives you a little bit more of a phenolic characteristic, more of the fruit flavors, and makes the wine a little more intense.

Fermenting the Wine in Contact with the Skins

This is the less common way of making wine and involves crushing the berries and fermenting them on the skins, which renders the wine quite phenolic, but with a huge amount of flavor to it.

“This is not a normal practice, but it’s something that can produce some really interesting results with the wine,” Crushpad Winemaker Jonathan Borreson describes. “There’s a lot of phenolic compounds in the skins, in the seeds, and also in the bits of stem that get through the crusher”.

According to Borreson, the resulting wine is typically too strong and bitter to drink on its own, but makes a great blending component nonetheless. Making wine using this method gives the product a lot of depth, a little bit of spice, and a strong apply character, while the inherent bitterness can be counterbalanced by blending it with other complementary wine assortments. As Borreson reveals, this way of making white wine opens up many different possibilities, and the Crushpad team is still experimenting with wines obtained like that, especially with respect to the numerous options of blending it.

Overall, whenever you want to make wine that has an intense flavor and a very rich texture, you should definitely consider the method described here. White wines that are fermented on the skins have a strong, unique taste, and can act as a great basis for a wide scope of custom wines, both red and white.