Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
15
Ingredients and Techniques
Theoretically, you could make “wine” or at least a liquid
containing alcohol, from just sugar, water, yeast and some
nutrients. But the whole point of wine is to preserve the
nutritional content of the starting fruits or vegetables, so we'll
look at it from that point of view. Any fruit or vegetable can
be used to make wine. Other than wine grapes, all fruits will
require some amount of supplemental sugar. The juice of
some fruits will require considerable dilution due to their high
degree of acidity or astringency, and some will produce wines
so tasty you'll wonder why you can't find them
commercially. Others, like asparagus, will be downright
unpalatable in some cases and suitable only for making
marinades.
Fruits
Wine grapes are the perfect fruit for making wine. All you
need to do is crush them and they make the perfect amount of
juice with the perfect levels of acidity and sugar. Every other
fruit is imperfect in some way. While fruits other than grapes
are imperfect, they can be made perfect through proper
adjuncts and technique.
With air transportation for produce so prevalent, there are
more fruits available in our local markets than I could ever
list, and quite a few I haven't tried because they are so
expensive, such as starfruit and guava. In general, the higher
the quality of the fruit, the higher the potential quality of your
