VIDEO: Growing, Making, & Improving Wines Workshop

STARKVILLE, Miss. (WCBI) –  A wine workshop at Mississippi State drew folks who like to not only drink, but make wine.

The Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Experiment Station hosted the wine class on Friday.

Red, white, sweet, or dry, most wine drinkers have a favorite.

“Making wine is like bottling New York City. All different organisms and all different chemicals coming together to make an unpredictable final product,” says wine expert, Ellie Butz.

How do you get that final product? Well, that’s what participants are finding out at this wine workshop.

“How to make the wine. How to prepare grapes for making the wine. What to measure, what not to measure, when to measure it, and then we’ll get into the wine making steps. What are the steps in making the wine, until you get to the bottling of the wine, and preserving a good wine. Then we’ll get end up tasting the wine, which is the best part,” says wine workshop organizer,  Professor Juan Silva.

This is the first time in many years for the wine class, and Butz wants the students to let this wine fact soak in.

“I want them to just believe how incredible, exciting a product it is in the chemical and the microbiology way. Flavor is wonderful. Food matches wonderful, but it’s just a living system.”

This winemaker has been making his own wine since he was 12, and has learned a lot over the years about turning grapes into magic.

“From initially cleaning the grapes, and it could take, for like white ones, or fruit wines, about a year, six months, but the red wines, they have to age some to mellow it out, and it takes three to four years,” says Richard.

He says making wine is easy, but making a good wine is the hard part.

“We’re small batch right now. The biggest batch we make is about eighty gallons, and the smallest we make is about three gallons.”

The workshop wrapped up with a wine and cheese tasting.