An article from Food and Wine, titled “You’ll Be Surprised by How Many Grapes it Takes to Make One Bottle of Wine,” explains the varying quantities of grapes required to produce different types of wine. On average, 1.25 to 1.50 kilograms of grapes, which can be anywhere from 600 to 800 or even thousands of grapes, are needed to make a standard-size bottle of still wine. This number varies significantly based on factors like grape variety, wine style and winemaking techniques.
For still wines, the pressing techniques in the winery play a crucial role in determining the number of grapes used. The use of pressed wine, for instance, can reduce the number of grapes needed as it extracts more juice from each berry.
Dessert wines require a substantially larger quantity of grapes. For example, producing the same volume of Aszú wine as a dry wine needs about 2.71 times more healthy grapes. For Royal Tokaji’s top-tier Essencia, an astonishing 262.4 times more berries are needed. This is because dessert wines often involve grapes that have undergone botrytization, leading to a significant loss of weight during maturation.
In the case of ice wine, a tonne (1000kg) of specific grape varieties like Riesling, Gewurztraminer, or Cabernet Franc yields only about 100 to 125 litres of juice, which is significantly less than what is obtained from grapes for still wines. This means that for a 375ml bottle of ice wine, 3.5 to 4.5kg of grapes are required.
