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For "must" meaning compulsion, see wikt:must.

For the condition affecting male elephants, see musth.

Grapes being pressed to create must

Must is the juice of freshly pressed grapes, prior to fermentation into wine. Must contains various quantities of pulp, skins, stems, and seeds, called pomace or grape solids, which typically comprise between 7–23 percent of the total weight of the must. These components, and the time they are allowed to be in contact with the juice, are critical to the final character of the wine.

When the winemaker judges the time to be right, the juice is drained off the pomace which is then pressed to extract the juice retained by the matrix. Yeast is added to the juice to begin the fermentation, while the pomace is often returned to the vineyard to be used as fertilizer. A portion of selected unfermented must may be kept as Süssreserve, in order to be added prior to bottling as a sweeting component.

Some winemakers create a second batch of wine from the used pomace by adding a quantity of water equivalent to the juice removed, letting the mixture sit for 24 hours, and draining off the liquid. This wine may be used as a drink for the employees of the winemaker or as a basis for grappa.

Must was commonly used as a cooking ingredient in ancient Rome. It was boiled down in lead or bronze kettles into a milder concentrate called defrutum or a stronger concentrate called sapa. It was often used as a souring agent and preservative, especially in fruit dishes. Geochemist Jerome Nriagu published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1983 hypothesizing that defrutum and sapa may have contained enough lead acetate to be of danger to those who consumed it regularly.

This term is also used by meadmakers for the unfermented honey-water mixture that becomes mead. It is also used in a similar fashion as a generic term by others producing wine-like products from other fruit and sugar ingedients. The analogous term in beer brewing is wort.

• Ron Herbst and Sharon Tyler Herbst; Wine Lover's Companion; Barron's; ISBN 0-8120-1479-0 (paperback, 1995)
• Marian W. Baldy, Ph.D.; The University Wine Course - A Wine Appreciation Text & Self Tutorial, 2nd Edition; The Wine Appreciation Guild; ISBN 0-932664-69-5 (paperback, 1995)
• John Whittaker; Winemaking; Lone Pine Publishing; ISBN 1-55105-030-7 (paperback, 1994)
• Jerome O. Nriagu; Saturnine Gout Among Roman Aristocrats: Did Lead Poisoning Contribute to the Fall of the Empire?; New England Journal of Medicine 308(11):660-3, 1983 Mar 17.;
• Ilaria G. Giacosa; A Taste of Ancient Rome; University of Chicago Press; ISBN 0-226-29032-8 (paperback, 1994)

• Julmust
• Pomace
• grape juice