Quality and safety assurance in winemaking

Winemaking poses many quality (appearance, taste, consumer acceptability) and safety (chemicals, metal parts) hazards. In this work, an effort is made for quality and safety analysis of winemaking, by describing and outlining the incoming hazards both for quality and safety in every process stage, starting from harvesting the grapes and arriving to distributing the final product. At the same time, preventative measures are proposed and critical factors and limits existing are determined. The study reveals that the CCPs for wine safety are the stages of grape growing, grape harvesting, fermentation, stabilization, aging and bottling. The CPs for wine quality are the stages of grape growing, grape harvesting, destemming, juice separation (white wine), must storage, fermentation, blending, aging and bottling. The most significant factors for both CCPs and CPs that should be controlled are determined. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.