Wine Maker

Lots of people like drinking wine: red wine, white wine, sparkling wine, and even the occasional pink wine (if you fancy a rosé). A few oenophiles, however, like wine so much that they don’t just enjoy drinking a glass of it with dinner; they devote their lives to making it.

If you’re one of those people, there’s a good chance you make your living as a Wine Maker, in which case it’s your job to make wine from grapes through an age-old winemaking process known as “vinification.” Also known as a Vintner or Enologist, a Wine Maker is either the owner of his or her own vineyard or an employee who works for someone else’s. Either way, as a Wine Maker you’re a modern-day Dionysus, spending your days worshiping the almighty grape.

Like a Brewer who makes beer, you might oversee the entire winemaking process, or just a single piece of it. Really, it depends on the size of your operation. Ultimately, though, the steps for making wine are always the same, consisting of: choosing and harvesting grapes; crushing or pressing them into juice; blending, filtering, and fermenting the juice; aging the fermented wine in wood or steel barrels; and, ultimately, bottling, distributing, marketing, and selling the final product for consumption at dinner parties, wine tastings, and countless other venues.

Because you’ll usually have lots of help during the actual winemaking process, your job isn’t always the manual making of wine. More often, it’s making the strategic decisions — such as when to harvest, what juices to blend, and how long to age them — that result in the best possible bottle of vino!