Why Is Wine (Almost) Always Made from Grapes?
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Wine is made from fermented grapes by definition.
Same as mead is made from fermented honey, kumiss is made from fermented mares' milk, kvass is made from fermented bread, and cider is made from fermented apples.
Wine made with other produce does exist: You can buy cherry wine and blueberry wine. But the market for them is tiny. They’re seen as a novelty and not taken seriously within the industry. - Being classed as 'novelties', we don't (yet) have standard definitions for those alcoholic drinks made from blueberries, etc. So we tack the word 'wine' on as a temporary fix.
I propose that henceforth cherry wine be defined as "Blush", and blueberry wine be defined as "Blurg".
"Have a glass of blush". "No I prefer to drink blurg".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandelion_Wine
Also, the site http://www.armywormwine.com/ seems to be down, but here is a discussion:
http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/army_worm_wine
(This seems to be wine made from "army worms", not "worm wine" from the army)
And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lychee_wine
Don't forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruno
OP (and other commenters) is being overly pedantic though, because the article wasn't talking about the name, but why grapes are fermented to make alcoholic drinks more than other fruit. The answer from the article being high sugar, good taste, good availability.
You can make wine from basically any fruit or plant which have high enough sugar content.
Unless it’s a restaurant run by Aussies, then you unknowingly get drunk, and risk a DUI because you live in the middle of bumfuck no where and driving home is the only option.
And "tea" has been used for infusions of plants other than the tea plant. Doesn't mean it isn't confusing.
https://www.thoughtco.com/wine-origins-archaeology-and-histo...
This is the book if anyone is interested, I found it very accessible.
https://books.google.com/books?id=w_pSDwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...
Merriam-Webster says:
Definition of wine
1a : the alcoholic fermented juice of fresh grapes used as a beverage
b : wine or a substitute used in Christian communion services
2 : the alcoholic usually fermented juice of a plant product (such as a fruit) used as a beverage
// blackberry wineI feel the need to point out if you were to not ignore history, then the word "wine" itself having been derived from the very Indo-European word used for grapevine thousands of years ago makes the connection between "wine" and "grapevine" way stronger than any similar connection one could find for beer.
The meaning of words change over time as culture change and evolve. The meaning of a word is how it is used, and "wine" have been used for ages to refer to cherry wine, dandelion wine, apple wine, etc.
I haven't even heard beer called wine though.
> and "wine" have been used for ages to refer to cherry wine, dandelion wine, apple wine, etc.
The possible problem with that argument is that compounds are often not the same thing as the intersection of their components. One famous example from my native language is that "pietní akt" refers to a memorial act for the dead (for example, fallen soldiers), whereas merely "akt" refers to a nude painting or sculpture (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_(art)). "Pietní akt" is not a subtype of "akt"; it's an idiom/colocation with its own peculiar meaning.
Will this meme ever die? The Greeks didn't know what a pathogen was, much less sterilization. They had clean water. The ancient wells of spring water are still there in Greek cities, still producing. The only time people wrote about using alcohol to make water "safe" was when the army was out in the wilderness and the only water nearby was brackish and stagnant.
> and to stay sober enough for symposiums of (allegedly) high-brow thought and debate.
Symposiums were just a bro party. They could be serious or salacious, and they could get rowdy; it depended on the host (kinda like today). They drank diluted wine because drinking undiluted wine would turn you mad and only uncivilized cretins drank it undiluted.
The end result was alcohol below 10%
Also, wine is shelf-stable and can be stored for long periods, while fruit juice cannot be. Modern fruit syrups and the like rely on large quantities of added sugar, which was not generally available back then.
That seems like the clearest answer. For a product with so much mythology and emphasis on single-origin natural ingredients, any seemingly "artificial" substitute will have a huge uphill struggle.
But people rarely do, and in general they aren't that great that you'd want to drink much/often. As another poster mentioned, they're largely seen as a novelty. As is mead, which is almost invariably wine-strength and very dense/sweet.
Oddly I'm seeing much more mead on the market here in Australia, and much more variation, there are dry, champagne-style meads, and quaffable meads around the 6% mark, as well as various interesting fruited meads and apple+other fruit ciders. I've even seen Cyser sold commercially in a mainstream store.
Oh, and for anyone that's ever wondered - "why is it that all the fruit flavoured ciders in the UK are exactly 4% alcohol?"
It's the licensing laws. Any drink over 4% that contains fruits other than just apples or pears is considered a wine and taxed a lot more. IIRC this is due to be reformed at some point.
The problem is that it just doesn't taste as good as the stuff made from grapes. I've tasted wines made from many different fruits and they're frankly all just ... not great. Not terrible (well, the home made apple wine (please note: WINE, NOT CIDER) was terrible) but just not great either.
They do this in the Frankfurt region of Germany, where it’s called apfelwein. They drink it diluted, which helps. Different taste than the ciders from north west of france or the uk
With wine making, you seal the bottle, add yeast and sugar and then add one of those circular tubes with water in it that lets co2 escape but does not let outside air in.
As for the apple wine it was made with yeast, sugar and then one of those curly tubes that don't let air in but do let CO2 out. I remember a large room of those big bottles bubbling away.
If you don't want it carbonated, you let fermentation do its thing, then bottle it. No special steps are required.
If you do want it carbonated, you let fermentation do its thing. Then you can either put it in a keg and force carb it, (put it under high pressure CO2 overnight) or you add a small, precise amount of sugar then immediately bottle it. The added sugar will then ferment in the bottles, but the CO2 won't escape, carbonating it.
I'm not an expert on cider/apple wine, my background is mostly beer and wine. I've made it a few times, usually carbonated, sometimes not. My understanding is that the terms are mostly interchangeable.
But yeast is involved in any fermentation process. You could make both cider or wine without adding any external yeast, but then you have a high chance of getting the wrong bacteria and messing it up. So almost everyone uses commercial yeast to start.
AFAIR it exists in the winemaking too, but it's even rarer.
In my country it's cold enough for grapes to not really grow well and there are some tiny farms that make and sell fruit wine and they suffer from exactly what you describe - it's very expensive and not well refined.
If you go to one of these places and have a nice experience tasting then you may even come away thinking that it was surprisingly good, but then you take a bottle home and it just tastes like fruit juice compared to good grape based wines...
> What’s the biggest misunderstanding about fruit wines?
> That it’s gotta be sweet. No matter what our tasting menu says, no matter what I say, people always comment, “Oh, it’s not sweet.” And I think, “Well no, I wasn’t lying to you.”
This is a large part of the problem, I think.
Non-grape "wines" are not going to succeed anywhere other than the US. Other countries have a ton of culture built around grape wine, or just use fruit to brew brandy or moonshine. No one in France is going to start making Chateau d'Prune 2022.
Brewing fruit wine in the the US has a reasonable chance of succeeding, but Americans don't really like drinks that are not sweet. They tolerate wine because it is seen as culturally refined due to a lot of marketing.
Sweet or semi-sweet wine made from fruits and marketed properly has a chance to substantially impact the American grape wine market.
End fermentation early, have more unfermentable sugars, or just add sweetener after fermentation and you have a sweeter wine. You can also choose yeasts that finish earlier. Use an aggressive yeast like champagne yeast and let it run to completion and the product is dryer.
I agree though, most Americans expect fruit wines to be sweet.
My hypothesis is that it's because they like the sweeter taste, and are unpleasantly surprised when the taste is very similar to the sour one of grape wine; when they were expecting something more like blueberry juice with an alcoholic kick.
It's possible that my hypothesis is overreaching. Testing it would involve a blind test with regular and sweet blueberry wines.
Fruit alcohol is quite common in France, especially from plums, but it's not called wine and the necessary added sugar (necessary with all fruits besides grapes) makes it a less "noble" product. These alcohols are becoming less and less common today.
Could you link me to an example? The only thing I found is vieille prune, which is a distilled brandy, and covered in my comment.
Huh? How you explain the insane popularity of beer?
I don't know how it tastes for you, bu the most common mainstream beers (ie lagers in some form) are pretty sweet. Belgian? Holy fucking sweet. IPA? Depends. APA? Sweet. Not the soda sweet, but sweet, compared to the plain water.
- they are many per single plant respect of most berry-alike fruits
- their plant last for decades with very deep (even 10+ meters) roots, so it's something able to survive bad weathers in many part of the world, they are also easy to collect by hands
- wine taste good alone, mix well with meat to made sausages etc
We can use kiwis for instance, but they are more fragile and they are relatively new in many parts of the world...
(I'm a big fan.)