"Elderberry Wine" redirects here. For the Elton John song of the same name, see Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player.Wine can be made from any sufficiently sweet food or, with addition of sucrose in the form of table sugar or honey, from other fruits and many other plant sources. This can include wines produced from fruits like apples and elderberries, starches like rice, vegetables like carrot or peapod, as well as flowers and herbs such as dandelion, elderflower, and even marijuana.[2] The most common, narrow definition of wine relates to the product of fermented grape juice, though it is sometimes broadened to include any beverage with a fermentation based on the conversion of a sugar solution into alcohol (fermented beverages based on hydrolyzed barley such as beer are often excluded). Some drinks such as cider, mead and perry are also excluded from this broad definition of wine for historical reasons.[4]
Fruit wines have traditionally been popular with home winemakers and in areas with cool climates such as North America and Scandinavia. Most fruits and berries have the potential to produce wine. Few foods other than grapes have the balanced quantities of sugar, acid, tannin, nutritive salts for yeast feeding and water to naturally produce a stable, drinkable wine, so most country wines are adjusted in one or more respects at fermentation. The amount of fermentable sugars is often low and need to be supplemented by a process called chaptalization in order to have sufficient alcohol levels in the finished wine. Sucrose is often added so that fruits having excessive levels of acids (usually citric or malic acid) can split the sucrose into fermentable fructose and glucose sugars. If the specific gravity of the initial solution is too high, indicating an excess of sugar, water or acidulated water may be added to adjust the specific gravity down to the winemaker's target range. Many fruit wines suffer from a lack of natural yeast nutrients needed to promote or maintain fermentation. Winemakers can counter this with the addition of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium available commercially as yeast nutrient. Like many conventional white wines, fruit wines often do not improve with bottle age and are usually meant to be consumed within a year of bottling.[5]
The fermentation of fruit wines at home was particularly fashionable in the UK in the 1970s and was popularized in the BBC TV series The Good Life.
