Pure conjectures attribute the discovery of wine to a Stone Age man who would have put ripe grapes of raisins in a wooden bowl or a skin bag and might have forgotten them and let them ferment during a few days. However no one knows who was this hypothetical Stone Age man and who could have tasted fermented raisin. Scientific and verified researches set the beginning of wine 6 000 years before Christ in Mesopotamia. Wine was one of the first things the humans being discovered and it can explain its prominent place in our modern cultures. Egyptians left us wine lists and wall paintings, they were indeed the first to have wine labels. Wine was common in classical Greece and Rome and many of the major wine producing regions of Western Europe today were established with Phoenician and later Roman plantations. Wine making technology, such as the wine press, improved considerably during the time of the Roman Empire; many grape varieties and cultivation techniques were known and barrels were developed for storing and shipping wine. Since its discovery, wine has played a lot of different roles : medicine, feasts, religion... However, wine success and permanence is due to the recent ability to age wine which allows the possibility to keep it for years. Fine wine was born.
In a first part, we will talk about wine-making or vinification then in a second part we will present the economy of wine around the world.

I – Wine-making

Wine-making starts with the selection of grapes and ends with bottling the finished wine. We can divide the wine-making into two major categories : still wine production and sparkling wine production.

The process of wine production stars with the grapes selection which is different whether you want to make a red or a white wine. The first step for a wine-maker is the harvest. The harvest is the picking of the grapes which are going to enter in the production process, it can be done mechanically or by hand. The vintner will choose to pick the