How Cheap Wine Is Made: Mass-Market vs Fine Wine

Cheap wine and fine wine part company four times before a bottle is filled: at the picking, at the press, at the vessel, and at the additions bench. Each of those decisions costs money, and industrial winemaking is the practice of declining to pay. So how cheap wine is made comes down to a line that we put plainly and most back labels work hard to distract you from: "The quality of the grapes determines the quality of the wine more than any other factor." The cheap end picks by machine instead of sorting by hand, squeezes harder to get more juice out of every ton of fruit, matures the result in steel with oak chips rather than in barrels, and corrects what the fruit failed to deliver with sugar, water, cultured yeast and fining agents. Most of that is legal and much of it is regulated. It also explains, step by step, why the liquid in the glass tastes the way it does.

How does machine harvesting change what ends up in the tank?

It removes the choosing. Mechanical harvesters are large tractors that straddle the trellises and use firm plastic or rubber rods to strike the fruiting zone and knock the grapes off the rachis. They cover a large area of vineyard in a short period with a minimum investment of manpower per harvested ton. That is the whole economic case for them.

The cost sits in what comes along for the ride. We list the disadvantage as the indiscriminate inclusion of foreign non-grape material: leaf stems and leaves first, then, depending on the trellis system and canopy management, mouldy grapes, canes, metal debris, rocks, and even small animals and bird nests. In the United States, mechanical harvesting is seldom used for premium winemaking, for two reasons: the indiscriminate picking, and the increased oxidation of the grape juice. In Australia and New Zealand it is more common on premium fruit, because of general labour shortages rather than because it is better.

Hand picking buys you a decision at every cluster. A picker who knows the fruit takes the ripe bunches and leaves behind the ones that are unripe or carry bunch rot, which is "an effective first line of defense to prevent inferior quality fruit from contaminating a lot or tank of wine". One rotten cluster does not stay in one bottle. It goes into the tank with everything else.

Why does cheap wine get pressed harder?

Because pressing is where volume comes from. Crushed grapes give up a considerable amount of juice with no pressure at all, and that this free-run juice is typically of higher quality than press juice. Press juice is lesser in quality because of the release and increase of total phenolic compounds, browning index and C6-alcohol levels, which are the compounds responsible for the herb-like taste in wine made with pressed grapes.

Wineries press anyway, and the reason is arithmetic: pressed juice can represent between 15% and 30% of the total juice volume from the grape. Give up the press fraction and you give up somewhere near a quarter of your output per ton. Modern presses run a programmed cycle, usually ramping from 0 Bar up to 2.0 Bar, and as the pressure rises the amount of tannin pulled out of the skins rises with it, often leaving the pressed juice excessively tannic or harsh. Because acid and water sit in the pulp while tannin sits in the skins and seeds, press juice also comes out lower in acidity and higher in pH than free run.

A producer who blends the whole press fraction back in is making a different wine from one who takes the free run and stops. The tannin those extra bars extract is not the ripe, structural kind that lets a bottle age.

What gets added when the fruit cannot carry the wine?

Sugar, first. For every gram of sugar converted, roughly half a gram of alcohol is produced, so a must needs about 24% sugars to reach 12% alcohol. If the grapes fall short, sugar can be added: one percent of alcohol takes 1.8 grams of sugar per 100 ml, which is 18 grams per litre. That is chaptalization. It is subject to local regulations in commercial winemaking, and that it is illegal in some countries and in California.

Then water. Amelioration adds water and sugar together to raise alcohol and dilute acidity at the same time, a practice used in New York State's cooler wine regions such as the Finger Lakes AVA and governed there by federal regulation. If a wine's acidity reads as diluted rather than lifted, this is one of the ways that happens.

Then the yeast. Yeast is already on the grapes, visible as a powdery bloom, and fermentation can run on it, but wild ferments give unpredictable results: the main problem is fermentation failing to finish, leaving sugar in a wine meant to be dry, and wild ferments frequently produce unpleasant acetic acid as a by product. Cultured yeast is added to the must to take that risk off the table. At volume, predictability is the product.

The far end of the scale drops the fruit entirely. Synthetic wines, also called engineered or fake wines, use no grapes at all: they start with water and ethanol, and add acids, amino acids, sugars and organic compounds.

Does the oak in a cheap bottle come from a barrel?

Often not. Red wine is characteristically moved into white oak barrels for weeks or months, which imparts oak aromas and some oak tannins. The cheaper route skips the barrel: oak can be added as chips to a vessel made of stainless steel or another neutral material. This process is mainly used in cheaper wine. Some aromatized wines go further still, taking woody extractives by artificial aging with small chips.

The chemistry explains why chips work at all. What reads as oak is largely a toasting signature. In oak volatiles extracted under standard conditions, guaiacol runs at 1 µg/L in untoasted oak and 30.3 µg/L in heavily toasted oak, while syringol goes from nothing to 313.3 µg/L across the same range. Guaiacol smells smoky, phenolic and medicinal, with a sensory threshold of 20 µg/L in white wine and 23 µg/L in red, and wines matured in heavily toasted oak carry it at 10 to 40 µg/L. Those compounds transfer whether the toasted wood is a barrel or a bag of chips.

How is industrial wine polished before bottling?

By taking things out. Cold stabilization drops the wine close to freezing for one to two weeks so tartrate crystals form and stick to the vessel. The reason as commercial: it improves the wine's aesthetic clarity and appeal, because "consumers often mistake harmless tartrate crystals for glass shards or wine faults".

Filtration does the same job at a finer scale. Clarification takes out particles you can see. Microbial stabilization needs at least 0.65 micrometers to retain yeast and 0.45 μm to retain bacteria, which removes the risk of refermentation in the bottle, and the trade is explicit: filtration at that level "may lighten a wine's color and body".

Fining removes tannin and haze. Gelatin has been used for centuries and is the agent most commonly used to reduce tannin content, alongside casein, egg whites, bone char, bull's blood, isinglass, PVPP, lysozyme and skim milk powder, or non-animal agents such as bentonite clay and diatomaceous earth. Then batches are blended, which is where a winemaker can "correct perceived inadequacies by mixing wines from different grapes and batches" produced under different conditions. Blending across different varieties or vintages is also how a label holds a consistent taste year after year, and it is a legitimate tool rather than a trick. It does different work at the two ends of the market: at the top it builds a cuvée, at the bottom it averages out problems.

What faults does the cheap end still carry?

Mostly the volatile ones, and there is a legal ceiling rather than a quality one. The Australian Wine Research Institute puts the legal maximum for volatile acidity in Australian wines, excluding SO2 and expressed as acetic acid, at 1.5 g/L. A sound wine sits at 0.1 to 0.4 g/L after fermentation. The aroma threshold can be as low as 0.1 to 0.125 g/L, and the level at which acetic acid is regarded as detrimental is usually above 0.7 g/L. So the law permits roughly twice what a taster would already call a problem.

Ethyl acetate is the one most people meet without naming it: the AWRI describes it as the odour of nail polish remover, with a reported sensory threshold of 12 mg/L. Normal wines run about 30 to 60 mg/L. Defective wines run about 150 to 200 mg/L. Wild yeasts such as Hansenula and Kloeckera produce both acetic acid and ethyl acetate in quantity before and during the early stages of fermentation, which is the risk cultured yeast is bought to remove.

A wine that goes wrong is not necessarily poured away. A wine with high volatile acidity can be filtered to remove the microbe responsible and then blended with a low-VA wine so that the acetic acid level lands below the sensory threshold. Heavy oak does similar work on Brettanomyces: the AWRI found the aroma threshold for 4-ethylphenol, the Band aid and medicinal marker for Brett, at 368 µg/L in a neutral red wine, 425 µg/L in a full bodied red with intense green methoxypyrazine character, and 569 µg/L once considerable oak influence was added. The louder the wine, the more it hides. If you want the faults worth returning a bottle over, the same thresholds are what your nose is working against.

Can you taste the difference blind?

Less reliably than anyone would like. Scientific blind tasting suggests the unreliability of wine tasting in both experts and consumers, including inconsistency in identifying wines by region and by price. Expectation does a lot of the work: people expect more expensive wine to have more desirable characteristics, and when they are given a wine falsely described as expensive they virtually always report it as tasting better than the same wine described as cheap.

The French researcher Frédéric Brochet "submitted a mid-range Bordeaux in two different bottles, one labeled as a cheap table wine, the other bearing a grand cru etiquette." Tasters called the supposed grand cru "woody, complex, and round" and the supposed cheap bottle "short, light, and faulty". The wine in both glasses was the same mid-range Bordeaux. Only the label moved.

In 2011 Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire ran a double-blind test with 400 participants and found that general members of the public could not separate expensive wines from inexpensive ones. His summary: "People just could not tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine". Read that as an instruction rather than a verdict. Knowing the origin, price, reputation or colour of what is in the glass prejudices judgment, which is why serious tastings hide the bottle and sometimes use a black glass to mask the colour. Buy the way you taste, and taste before you know the price.

Which wines are actually worth cellaring?

Fewer than the cellaring conversation suggests. Only about 10% of all red and 5% of white wine will taste better after five years than after one. Time from harvest to drinking ranges from a few months for Beaujolais nouveau made by carbonic maceration to over twenty years for wine with good structure and high levels of acid, tannin or sugar. Everything described above pulls in the opposite direction of that structure: press tannin instead of skin tannin, chip aroma instead of barrel maturation, filtration that lightens colour and body.

Cheap wine is built to be drunk now, and boxes and cans exist because they carry that job at lower cost and reduced weight. The question worth asking of any bottle you are holding for later is not what it cost, but whether it was made with ageing in mind.

Our drink-now list starts from that side of the question, and the fine wine market index tracks what the top of the market does with the wines that pass it. If you want the winemaking decisions behind those wines pulled apart one at a time, the weekly winemaking briefing does exactly that, and you can read the next one before you buy.