Marie, one of the responders to last week’s Whining & Dining online wine tasting, asked” How do you get a white wine and a red wine from the same grape?” The question followed a post about white zinfandel and red zinfandel.

Here’s the story.

With the rare exception of one obscure grape grown in a country far away, all grape juice is pale in color. Whether the grape is the dark purple cabernet sauvignon and merlot or the greenish-yellow chardonnay, the juice will be close to clear. The color in red wine — and red is a euphemism for ruby or purple or magenta or all the other dark hues a “red” wine can have — comes from contact with the grape skins during fermentation. The heat that develops during fermentation, when grape sugars are transformed into alcohol and carbon dioxide (the latter blows off), as well as the action of “punching down” the mass of skins that rests on top of the fermenting juice, extracts the color compounds from the skins, lending color to the wine.

The longer the fermentation and extraction, the darker the wine will be.

It’s possible to make a light-colored or pale wine from red grapes, like “blush” wines or classic roses, by giving the juice minimal contact with the grape skins. Depending on how long that contact is, the color of a rose wine can vary from the palest copper or melon hue to pink bubble gum or strawberry.

Long fermentation and deep extraction are relatively new phenomenon in winemaking. In the past, most red wines, even great wines intending for aging, like Bordeaux and Burgundy, were much lighter in color. That’s why the British, for centuries, have called Bordeaux red wines “claret,” the French word for “clear,” even though the wines are darker today. It’s a mistake to believe that because a wine is dark in color and heavily extracted that it’s better than a lighter, more delicate wine; the important principle is balance among all elements.

Red wines, by the way, gently fade as they age, taking on a ruddy brick-garnet color and finally fading to paleness. White wines get darker as they mature.