What Happens After Harvest?
All year, the work in the vineyard has been leading to one moment: harvest.
The grapes are picked, the bins are loaded, and the journey from vineyard to winery begins. But what feels like the finish line after a long growing season is really the beginning of another story.
This year has been an especially interesting one to watch, with 2026 bringing an unusually early harvest to many wine regions across the Northern Hemisphere. Whenever the fruit comes in, timing matters. Once those grapes leave the vineyard, a whole new series of decisions begins, and each one can influence the wine that eventually reaches our glass.
So, what actually happens next?
First Stop: Sorting
Before fermentation begins, the fruit needs a good look.
Grapes may be sorted in the vineyard, again when they arrive at the winery, or both. Leaves, stems, underripe berries, damaged fruit, and anything else the winemaker doesn’t want in the finished wine can be removed.
At some wineries, this is still done entirely by hand. Others use technology such as optical sorters, which can scan individual berries as they move along a conveyor belt and reject fruit that doesn’t meet specific parameters.
How the grapes were harvested can play a role here, too. Hand harvesting allows whole clusters to arrive at the winery relatively intact and gives growers the ability to make selections in the vineyard. Machine harvesting is faster and can be incredibly efficient, particularly when timing, vineyard size, or labor availability matters.
Neither tells us everything about quality on its own. What matters is the condition of the fruit arriving at the winery and what happens to it next.
Destem, Crush, Press…or Not
This is where the paths really begin to separate.
Some grapes are destemmed, removing the berries from the stems. Others may go into fermentation as whole clusters. Grapes can be gently crushed to release juice, pressed immediately, or left largely intact.
And not every wine follows the same route.
For most white wines, the grapes are typically pressed relatively early, separating the juice from the skins before fermentation. The juice then ferments on its own.
Rosé generally follows a similar path. Red grapes provide the color, but after a relatively short period of skin contact, the juice is pressed away from the skins and fermented much like a white wine. How long that skin contact lasts can make a significant difference in color, flavor, and texture.
For red wines, the juice usually ferments with the skins. Those skins provide color, tannin, flavor, and structure, making the amount of contact and the way it is managed an important part of the winemaker’s toolkit.
And then there are orange or amber wines, where white grapes are fermented with their skins, borrowing a technique we more commonly associate with red winemaking.
Same basic ingredient. Very different paths.
Then Comes Fermentation
This is the transformation at the heart of winemaking.
Yeast consumes the natural sugars in grape juice and converts them into alcohol, along with carbon dioxide and a host of compounds that contribute to aroma and flavor.
It sounds straightforward, but fermentation gives a winemaker plenty of decisions to make.
Should fermentation begin with the yeasts naturally present on the grapes and in the winery, or with a selected cultured yeast? At what temperature should the wine ferment? In stainless steel, concrete, barrel, amphora, or another vessel?
Temperature matters. Cooler fermentations are often used when the goal is to preserve fresh fruit and aromatic character, while warmer fermentations can encourage greater extraction and create a very different expression.
The vessel matters, too. Stainless steel is neutral and offers precise temperature control. Oak can contribute texture, oxygen exposure, and, depending on the barrel, flavor. Concrete offers its own combination of thermal stability and gentle oxygen exchange.
These choices don’t work in isolation. They become part of the larger picture the winemaker is trying to create.
Managing the Skins
During red wine fermentation, grape skins rise to the surface of the fermenting juice and form what is known as the cap.
That cap needs attention.
Winemakers may punch it down, physically pushing the skins back into the fermenting juice, or pump over, drawing wine from the bottom of the vessel and circulating it over the top. There are other techniques as well, and each affects how much color, tannin, aroma, and flavor are extracted from the skins.
More extraction isn’t automatically better.
A delicate Pinot Noir may call for a very different touch than Cabernet Sauvignon or Syrah. The grape variety, vintage, ripeness of the fruit, tannin structure, and style the winemaker is seeking all come into play.
This is one of the things I find so fascinating about winemaking. There is no single recipe.
A Series of Choices
By the time fermentation is complete, the grapes that came through the winery doors have changed dramatically. But the wine still has a long way to go.
What began in the vineyard continues through every decision in the cellar: what to keep, what to remove, how gently to handle the fruit, how long to leave juice with skins, which yeast to use, how warm or cool to ferment, how much to extract, and which vessel to choose.
Great wine may begin in the vineyard, but what happens after harvest helps determine how that vineyard ultimately finds its way into the glass.
Next month: Fermentation may be finished, but the wine isn’t. We’ll follow what happens next as wines move into barrels, tanks, concrete, amphorae, and beyond, and explore how those choices continue shaping the finished wine.
Cheers to your next great bottle,
Shelly Fitzgerald
Wine Director | WSET Diploma | Certified Sommelier