The art of wine making

While wine is becoming ever more popular during parties and for entertaining at home, small talk during such joyful events often settles on the quality of a good wine.

But what goes into wine making?

A seasoned wine maker, Mario Fava, has been making wine as a hobby for the past 30 years. He learnt the tricks of the trade from his father Michael, known as taz-Zizu, of Luqa.

Mr Fava is continuously looking for more efficient ways of growing grapes and fine-tuning the maturation process of the wine.

The grapes he presses are brought in by his friends and relatives apart from what he himself grows.

"My father used to press grapes from vines grown as bushes known as ta' mal-hajt because they were usually planted next to the rubble walls separating one field from another and not as they are mostly grown nowadays on wire.

"The difference between the two methods is that the grapes from the vines grown as bushes consist of more meat than juice while the grapes grown on the wire have more juice than meat."

In practice this means that a qantar - 80 kilos - of grapes from vines grown on the wire would fill one demijohn of juice while the grapes from vines grown as bushes would only fill three quarters of a demijohn, Mr Fava explained.

A demijohn holds the equivalent of 75 bottles.

He presses both white and red grapes. The red colour comes from the skin of the red grapes. Mr Fava presses the red and white grapes separately but then mixes them when he comes to prepare the sekonda, which is the second production of wine made from grape skins to which another 80 kilos of grapes, water, yeast, tannin, citric acid and sugar are added to spur a second fermentation and raise the alcohol level.

About 70 per cent of the sekonda is water.

When the grapes are crushed, they are separated from the stalk. The grape juice is left to settle in fibreglass tanks for 24 hours. Then yeast is added together with a small amount of sugar.

The juice is stirred three times a day - in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. This process is repeated for three days. The first batch of wine, the wine of the first quality called il-prima, is then filtered of seeds and sediment and put into demijohns.

It is eventually transferred to other demijohns in order to filter it of the remaining sediment.

By talking to other growers and searching through books, Mr Fava has picked up a lot of tricks of the trade about how to grow healthy vines - another facet of wine growing he finds exhilarating.