Every account of winemaking runs through the same six steps, and most of them stop there. What that leaves out is the part a winery actually has to decide: at each step there is a moment where the equipment stops being background and starts setting the limit on what the winemaker can do.
This is that walk-through — the process, and where the cellar decides.
1. Harvest
Acidity, sugar and flavour ripeness set the picking date; weather usually gets a vote. Hand picking suits small blocks and selective passes, machine picking suits scale, and many wineries do both — often at night, when cooler fruit arrives more stable and the ferment starts from a lower baseline.
Where the cellar decides: the peak. Harvest does not arrive evenly. Three weeks of the year, everything happens at once, and the constraint is rarely total capacity — it is how many separate vessels are available on the day two blocks come in together. A cellar sized for the average is short in vintage; one sized entirely for the peak sits idle for nine months.
2. Sorting and destemming
Fruit is sorted, usually by hand for quality tiers, and stems are removed. The proportion of whole cluster retained is a stylistic decision, not a default.
Where the cellar decides: how fruit reaches the tank. Every metre of lift, every transfer, every drop is a chance to shear skins and pick up harshness the wine did not need. Gravity where the building allows it, gentle handling where it does not.
3. Crushing and pressing
For whites the press comes first: juice off skins and solids quickly, before colour and phenolics arrive uninvited. For reds it is the opposite — skins, seeds and juice go into the fermenter together, because colour and tannin are the point.
Where the cellar decides: the tank’s opening and shape. Filling a red fermenter with must is not the same job as filling a white tank with juice, and a fermenter that is awkward to fill is awkward for the whole of vintage.
4. Fermentation
Yeast converts sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Ambient yeast will start the job within six to twelve hours; most cellars inoculate, because a predictable start is worth more than a romantic one. Whites typically ferment between 12 °C and 22 °C, reds between 20 °C and 32 °C.
In red fermentation the CO₂ pushes skins to the surface as a cap, and that cap has to be worked — punched down or pumped over, several times a day — or the extraction simply does not happen.
Where the cellar decides: almost everything. Cap management needs access, which is the argument for open-top formats such as the Diamond Square OT Fermenter and the OT Conical Fermenter. Temperature needs jacket coverage that actually reaches the working volume. And the tank has to be reachable safely, at height, several times a day, for weeks — which makes catwalk and platform layout part of the fermentation decision rather than a fitting-out afterthought.
The trade-off open-top formats carry is exposure: an open tank is an open tank for the rest of the year too. That is the problem the Everseal™ System exists to resolve — open-top access during the ferment, a protected boundary afterwards.
5. Clarification
Solids drop out. Time and cold do most of it; fining agents bind what remains; filtration takes the rest. Racking moves the clear wine off its lees into a clean vessel.
Where the cellar decides: how the wine gets out. A flat-bottomed tank is emptied by someone climbing into it with a shovel. A conical base does the same job under gravity — the Enclosed Conical Fermenter discharges a five-tonne ferment in roughly five minutes, which during vintage is not a convenience but a day back.
Racking is also where a cellar’s plumbing shows its quality. Every avoidable transfer is oxygen pickup and pump handling the wine did not ask for. See Process & Transfer Systems.
6. Aging and bottling
Wine may go to bottle soon after clarification, or spend months to years in tank, barrel or bottle first. Closure choice — cork or screw cap — is a decision about intended drinking window as much as tradition.
Where the cellar decides: the long hold. This is the least dramatic phase and the one where equipment quality shows up most clearly, because nothing announces a problem until the wine is tasted. Weld quality, seal integrity and thermal stability over months are what separate a tank that holds wine from one that merely contains it.
Read the six steps as a sequence and winemaking looks linear. Read them as a set of constraints and a pattern appears: the decisions that matter most are made before the fruit arrives, when the cellar is specified. That is the argument for planning equipment as a system rather than as a list of line items.