Because if it was made from fermented malt and hops we would call it beer?
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".
"Wine" has been used for alcoholic beverages made from fruits other than grapes (or sometimes flowers, but never apples) since at least 1398 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Sometimes it's just used as a catch-all for unknown brewed drinks.
"Wine" today means grape wine. People ferment other things and call it dandelion wine or mango wine but not just wine (unless they're trying to be obscure and edgy).
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.
Mead is also called honey wine in German at least, so not exclusively fruit (at least if it's used with a qualifier). That's only in normal speech, though, as the trade name 'wine' is exclusively for grape wine.
Yes, and 110 proof Moutai baijiu is called "wine" in China, if you ask for a translation. I think there are better translations like, "white lightning".
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.
Yep and in those cases, a qualifier is added, such as blueberry wine.
If someone refers to something simply as "wine", I think most of us will expect grape.
Every organization producing dictionaries includes other fruits as part of the definition for wine. Wine was originally made from all types of fruits, and grapes became the most ubiquitous because of preference for taste. That doesn't make other fruit wines not wine, it just means we most commonly associate the category of fermented fruit drinks with grapes, as that is what has been most commonly available for a very long time.
During covid I walked through half of a sommelier prep book, so I reopened it just now and page 1 already covers “Wine - a fermented beverage from the juice of any fruit, usually grapes.”
This is the book if anyone is interested, I found it very accessible.
We have muscadine wine in the Southern US.[1] Its made with a native grape like fruit. I do not suggest trying it unless you like extremely sweet wine.
It is a classics to inisist on a simplistic definition which ignores all the history and cultural context of a term, and then no-true-scotsman any objection.
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 wine
> a simplistic definition which ignores all the history and cultural context of a term
I 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'm not committing that fallacy as defined because I'm not making "a claim about the present meaning of a word based exclusively on that word's etymology".
> 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.
Wine is (almost) always made from grapes because we call it different things when we make it from other fruits. Wine made from apple juice, for example, is called cider.
> 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.
Sweetness of the finished product is up to the maker.
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.
It is, but why comment on sweetness if you have an "expected" taste from wine, whether it's grape or blueberries? Anyone who orders wine should be expecting it to be mostly sour (or dry to use wine terminology), unless it's explicitly labeled as a dessert or fortified wine.
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.
> No one in France is going to start making Chateau d'Prune 2022.
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.
Eh? Give someone, who drinks only lagers, anything with IBU > 35 and they would cry why it is so bitter.
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.
You can buy fruit wines of all different sorts in the UK.
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.
> This is why producers typically add sugar to make non-grape wine. Grapes are one of the lone fruits with the sugar levels for wine’s high ABV and a safe, shelf-stable product.
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.
What about cider? The usual way to make traditional cider in the UK ("scrumpy") is to simply squeeze out and bottle the juice, and let nature take its course. It typically comes out medium-sweet like this.
The Nashoba Valley Winery near Hudson, Massachusetts features some very tasty wines made from Cranberry/Apple, Pear, Gravenstein, Peach, Plum, Raspberry, Strawberry Rhubarb, and much more.
When I was visiting Australia, I visited a winery that made ginger wine. It was amazing, and it was what I would want to drink with Asian food 100% of the time. I assumed I'd be able to find ginger wine back in California, but alas no one makes the stuff here! I have actually considered ordering a case of it from the winery in Australia, even though shipping would cost an arm and a leg.
Thanks! Sounds like it could be merely flavored by ginger (and made from fermented grapes/other fruit), or actually made from fermented ginger. Is that right?
Having grown up with relatives that made LOTS of home made wine from apple juice, I can assure you that wine can be and is made from many other things.
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.
To make good cider you want to use special apples, which are not really nice to eat, otherwise the drink is very sour.
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
For me the difference is in the process. Cider usually ends up being (slightly) carbonated and you let it interact with fresh oxygen.
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.
I'm not an expert by any means but my understanding is that cider is usually carbonated - so you don't let all the CO2 escape.
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.
The process for making a carbonated or non-carbonated beverage is basically identical. Both will use airlocks (the curly tubes that don't let air out but do let air in) during primary fermentation. The difference between wine and vinegar is adding oxygen during fermentation; if you add oxygen you get vinegar, if you don't, you get wine.
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.
I haven't heard of hops being used in cider making, but maybe they are used somewhere?
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.
I live in a US wine producing region... there are a few people in the area who produce non-grape wines or non-commercial grape varietal wines as hobby projects. Strawberry wine in particular is memorable - a bit like rose; very nice on a summer day. I guess what I'd say about these wines is that they often simply don't fit our norms for wine. For example, when people come to my area they are either looking for wines that are refreshing to counter our hot weather, or wines that are big bodied and stand up against food. The non-grape wines are seldom refined to the degree that they fit traditional American wine drinker's tastes and expectations. In our area, many wines are > $50+/bottle, some $100+/bottle, and it's really hard to convince a consumer to pay that for a strawberry or cherry wine, thus they get sidelined as toy projects and thus forgotten about as legitimate wines.
You may very well be correct that it could be possible to make very good wine from other fruit but there's cultural stigma attached and the process isn't as well developed.
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...
> who often opted for watered-down wine to sterilize pathogens in the water
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.
Just because water is safe at the source doesn't mean it stays that way if kept for long. Many, many cultures, notably China, avoid drinking fresh water because they've learned the hard way that it's not safe enough, although the Chinese solution was to boil it and turn it into tea.
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.
The comment you are replying to talked about the myth that people mixed water and wine to sterilize the water. Wine does not have high enough alcohol content to sterilize water.
Pomegranate is my favourite one, but only if it's fresh. 99% of supermarket wine has a black-ish color that appears as wine ages and tastes completely different than fresh.
A winemaker in the Bourgogne told me that one other good reason is the tartaric acid in the grapes. This acid is not decomposed by the bacteria and stabilizes the wine. Not that many fruits have this acid.
Beside it's definition grapes have some advantages over other fruits:
- 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...
81 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadWine 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...
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitis_rotundifolia
Merriam-Webster says:
I 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.
> 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.
[Standard] https://katlenburger.de/
[Organic] https://en.franz-stettner.com/
Cheers.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrumpy
(I'm a big fan.)
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...
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.
- 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...