Growing the Grapes

• Technically, growing and harvesting grapes is part of making wine. Typically, wine grapes take between 5 to 7 months to ripen.

Squeezing the Juice

• Once you have ripe grapes, the next step of making wine is to press them to produce juice. Depending on how many grapes you have, this can take as little as a few hours or up to a few days.

Fermentation

• The real key to making wine is turning the sugary grape juice into an alcoholic beverage via fermentation. The fermentation process takes 3 to 10 days.

Aging

• Aging wine is an optional step that is used to add depth and flavor to wine. This is the part of wine-making with the most variance in time, because some wines are aged for many years. However, many wines are not aged at all.

Filtration

• Filtering wine is another optional part of wine-making. Unless you are dealing with very high production, filtering is relatively quick, and takes only a few hours.