Cecille's Creativity

Red wine gets its color from the skins of red grapes (like white grapes, the flesh of red grapes is greenish, with one or two rare exceptions). As with white wines, grapes are harvested and crushed, but then the winemaker allows the grape juice to ferment in contact with the skins for days or even weeks, drawing out the polyphenols and tannins that produce color and structure. Then, also unlike most whites, red wines are usually aged for a year or two before being bottled (classically in oak barrels) to soften their roughness and astringency.