Making Special Wines, A Rising Trend
Did it ever occur to you where wines come from? What do people use in making wine? How does one do the process of making wine? When one thinks of wine, the fruit that immediately comes to mind is grapes, right? After all, it is the most typical of all fruit wines. From here comes the three more popular kinds of wine which are Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Carignan. However, there are still so many kinds of wines out there that you can use for your own personal consumption. Did it ever occur to you that there could be other sources of wine? What are these other sources used in making wine? Numerous recipes in making wine will show you that wines do not only come from fruits, but from other products as well which you will find out as you read on…
Non-Grape Wine
Like what was mentioned, there are other wines that are made from other fruits besides grapes. There are wines made from different kinds of berries like strawberries, elderberries, blueberries, etc. There are wines made from starches as well as flowers and weeds likes marijuana and dandelion.
Fruit wines have become more popular among those making wine in the colder regions such as North America and Scandinavia. The reason for this is that many of the fruits and berries available in these areas have the potential to produce real good wine for everyday consumption. It doesn’t matter much if the sugar levels of these fruits are quite low. They can resolve this problem by simply supplementing the process with chaptalization. This process in making wine makes the fruit produce sufficient alcohol levels to produce good wine. Winemakers add sucrose so that fruits having excessive levels of acids (usually citric or malic acid) can split the sucrose into fermentable fructose and glucose sugars. Furthermore, many fruit wines suffer from a lack of natural yeast nutrients which are needed to maintain or promote fermentation. What winemakers do to counter this is add nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Not like the other grape-based wines, fruit wines often do not really improve with bottle age and must be consumed within a year of bottling.
Starch Wine
Not many people are familiar with the fact that wine can be produced from starch. Two perfect examples of this kind are Sake and rice wine. Making wine of this nature is significantly different from the usual methods of winemaking. But it does closely resemble the process of making beer.
Other Wines
There are other, somewhat extraordinary, sources of wine. Making wine in China is quite unique because they sue fish. In Scotland, home winemakers have experimented with making wine out of turnips and carrots. Others have tried it with honey, oranges and lemons. In the US, many have already experimented with wines that come from marijuana. In the Celtic regions, they are very much fond of wine made from dandelion. In West Africa, they use their palm trees where red palm oil also comes from. Soon, as you become an expert on this, you too can come up with your own winemaking recipe and winemaking instructions.
