A wine maker (often shortened to the single word; winemaker), is a person in the occupation of making wine. Usually he or she will be employed by wineries or wine companies at which places their job will include cooperating with viticulturists, monitoring the maturity of grapes to ensure their quality and to determine the correct time for harvest, crushing and pressing grapes, monitoring the settling of juice and the fermentation of grape material, filtering the wine to remove remaining solids, testing the quality of wine by tasting, placing filtered wine in casks or tanks for storage and maturation, preparing plans for bottling wine once it has matured and making sure that quality is maintained when the wine is bottled.
   Nowadays wine making is more of a science than the art it used to be because there are numerous laboratory tests that have to be made each day, so you will generally find that wine makers will usually have at least a Bachelor’s degree in the subject. Wine makers are also referred to as Oenologists as they study oenology - the science of wine.
   Wine making has often changed in response to evolving tastes and varying demands of the markets, and also as a result of increasing scientific knowledge about the biochemical processes involved, and also wine making practices are forced to change due to legislation. In particular a well-known wine critic can influence the wine markets by valuing highly wines he or she likes and not valuing so highly those he or she dislikes.
   It has been known for wine tasters’ preferences to be so influential as to encourage wine makers to utilize such practices as cool fermentation, adding dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) during fermentation, injecting small amounts of oxygen during fermentation, using more new oak barrel ageing, and reducing the use of fining and filtering.
   Sometimes changes in winemaking are region-specific. For example, historically, all fruit along with green stems and leaves went into fermenting tanks in Bordeaux, causing the wine's trademark bitterness. However, many vintners now carefully sort grapes to remove all rotten, diseased, unripe, or blemished berries.