Une brève histoire du vin et comment il est élaboré

Imagine you are on holiday in France. It is the beginning of the evening. You walk slowly through a vineyard, and the day gets cooler. The sun is low, the light turns golden, and the vines look almost endless. Heavy bunches of grapes hang near your hand—sweet, warm, ready. You stop and think: how does this fruit become wine? In this chapter, you are going to find out. Step by step, you will learn how people make wine, and you will learn French by reading.

Wine starts quietly. It is just grapes on a vine, nothing spectacular. In the early morning, they are fresh and firm. In the afternoon, they soften in the heat. They look ordinary — like something you could nibble and forget. But inside, something waits: sugar, acid, water, and aromas. With time and attention, this “ordinary” fruit becomes something we keep for birthdays, dinners, and long conversations — or even a normal evening. This quiet start is where your wine story begins.

Here is the simple definition: wine is fermented grapes — either fresh grape juice or must. Fermentation can be complete or partial, depending on the style. A winemaker does not “create” wine like a machine. Winemakers guide a natural change. They keep the grapes clean and protected so that the good microbes can work.

The main worker is yeast. Yeast is a very small living fungus — so small you cannot see it, but strong enough to change a whole harvest. There are thousands of types of yeast. In modern cellars, we often add selected yeasts, and we control the conditions with care. Yeast eats the sugar to get energy, and it produces alcohol and carbon dioxide (CO₂). It also creates aroma molecules — in a very small amount, but with a big effect. If the place is clean and protected, yeast does its work well. If it is dirty or messy, other microbes can bring sour, strange, or rotten flavors.

People knew it long before science had words to explain it. In ancient times, someone crushed grapes, kept the juice, and simply waited. A few days later, it bubbled. It smelled different. It had a stronger taste. And the big surprise: it did not rot, like fruit juice usually does. It could be kept. This surprise became a habit, then a skill, then a tradition.

We can go back very far in the history of wine. In Georgia, archaeologists found remains on pottery that show winemaking around 6000–5800 BC. This means people did not only drink grape juice: they made it ferment on purpose. Wine is not a modern hobby. It is very old human knowledge.

Another old place shows that winemaking was already a real process, not just luck. In Areni, in Armenia, a cellar in a cave dates from about 4100–4000 BC. Archaeologists found tools there to press, ferment, and store — together, in the same place. The tools were simple, but the process was already there: press, ferment, store, serve.