The list of spirits made from distilled fruits and other high-sugar plants is incredibly long (brandy, rakia, vodka, tequila, rum, etc etc). We could I’m sure fill this thread on just different variants of distilled fruit products.
The list of non-distilled wines is pretty short. Off the top of my head grape wine, cider (technically a wine), and there is an undistilled agave wine (whose name escapes me). But after that it gets pretty thin on the ground, I’m sure I’ve missed a couple but there are far far fewer than distilled spirits based on fruit.
Why is that? Do most fruits just taste bad after fermenting unless they are distilled?
A problem is that a lot of fruit are too acidic or low in sugars to ferment tastily just on their own. But lots of fruit wines are made, just not commercially.
I have had commercial strawberry, blueberry, and elderberry wines. All were made with added sugar and none were very good. Too sweet. I’ve also had plum wine but I think that is actually a distilled liquor product infused with plums.
I also once accidentally made pineapple wine by leaving a cut fruit salad in my fridge too long. It was mostly pineapple with some cut cherries and kiwi. The juice at the bottom fermented.
There is also mead which is honey wine. Really there isn’t a big difference between spirits distilled from fruits and their wine counterparts except that spirits keep better for transport and without a heavy dose of tannins most fruit wines are very prone to spoilage.
So if you’re in town for a berry festival it’s likely someone will have a berry wine for sale but it will be more expensive than normal wine and probably won’t last through the month. Small volumes plus short shelf lives make it hard for fruit wines to gain large scale popularity.
Fruit spirits on the other hand are basically invulnerable ones they are in the bottle. They are still hard to make in volume for instance an acre of apples will make about 600 bottles on apple brandy while an acre of cherries will make about 300 while an acre of grapes will be closer to 900 bottles and an acre of grain will make 1200 bottles of whiskey.
If we’re including mead, there are eleventybillionvariations with unique names. Metheglin, acerglyn, braggot, cyser, melomel, pyment, and bochet are common in home meadmaking.
I’d be curious to see if there’s a correlation between climate and whether or not a locality makes wine/beer vs. brandy/whiskey.
Or for that matter, if there’s a wine/beer tradition that predates the invention of distillation in those areas, and if that’s why they kept with wines instead of moving to brandy?
Corn is one of the most calorie dense food stuffs in a calorie per acre measurement basically just behind potatoes. Generally, calories are a measurement of the starch content and in making booze we are turning that starch into sugar to be turned in to alcohol. I’ve never had to look into starting a potato farm for my clients, at least not yet, I’m sure its coming, or a sugar plantation, that one I’ve at least started the conversations, but I would guess both of those are going to be close to if not more efficient.
Looking around a you can grow 60,000 pounds of potatoes per acre and potatoes are about 20% solid and 85% starch (Corn is 70% starch at harvest) so we could get about 10,200 pounds of starch per acre which would work out to 2,500 bottles per acre (making some assumptions about efficiency). Sugar cane looks like 76,000 pounds per acre yielding 7,600 pounds of sugar and 2,550 pounds of molasses from there you can make about 6,800 bottles per acre.
So in rough calculations rum is the cheapest booze per acre which pretty much matches what we see on the market though I haven’t compensated for cost of growing/harvesting and processing not to mention subsidies that make grain alcohol the gold standard in the US for dirt cheap booze.
I’m not sure that that correlation is going to work too well. Germany has a large beer culture and yet their primary spirits are mostly schnapps and fruit derived. France is wine country and they have a very nice tradition of brandies of both fruit and grape varietals. Spain also has a nice fruit brandy tradition though I’m not sure if I’d qualify them as a wine country. Italy is wine country but doesn’t have much of a brandy tradition, though there is some, but they are fruit spirit focused. Going North the English, Irish, Scotish areas are whiskey though England took the malt base gin, genever from the Dutch and turned it into the neutral base. While Belgium has a great beer culture they don’t do much with whiskey that I’m aware of. Most of the historical Eastern spirits I’m aware off are milk or rice based so that would reflect what they were growing. In the US we were primarily a cider/brandy country until prohibition when the orchards were cut down and whiskeys were able to regrow faster and surpassed brandies.
Then you’d be just about the only one who wouldn’t…?
Also, I suppose that there are some specialized regional Spanish fruit brandies, (like in virtually ANY European country) but grape wine is far & away Spain’s most important alcoholic beverage. I would have thought that practically anyone would have known this…
An yet the first hit on google shows that more Spaniards drink beer (50%) and spirits (28%) then wine (20%). So at least El Pais (second largest circulation in Spain) thinks Spain is a beer country. I’m not sure if I should believe them or you.
Wow, that really is surprising. I do think of Spain as a wine country, but, in terms of per capita wine consumption, they are pretty darn low on the list.
In case you can’t access that (for some reason, when I click on it, I’m unable to see the stats).
Here are the 2014 consumption numbers, per capita wine consumption in liters:
Italy 48.1
France 47.4
Switzerland 44.7
Portugal 42.6
Austria 41.1
Greece 38.1
Germany 36.2
Denmark 35.9
Argentina 33.6
Hungary 30.9
Belgium and Luxembourg 30.5
Australia 29.3
Uruguay 29
New Zealand 27.1
Sweden 27.1
Netherlands 27
Slovakia 25.1
Romania 25.5
UK 23.9
Spain 19.8
Now, that said, taking it from the production side, Spain is #3 in the world, which I guess explains to me why I thought of Spain as obviously a “wine country.” So it depends on how you define it.
Nope but then again I couldn’t name a Spanish wine either. According to El Pais again Spain is thefourth largest beer producerin Europe. Poland is third and I couldn’t name a Polish beer either.
Generally, I agree with you I think of Spanish wine and Brandies as their export spirits but when I look at the data for what they actually produce and drink they appear to be a beer country. Which is why I said I wasn’t sure what to call them.
Fair enough, I am totally shocked about the data concerning Spanish wine drinking habits, because on my visits there, wine drinking in bars, restaurants and cafes seemed omnipresent, like it is in Portugal and maybe even more so than in Italy, although Italian beer, while not great, tasted 1000x better than the Spanish or Portugese brews I have tried.
As far as Polish beer goes, before I moved here to Krakow back in 2015, I had also never tried Polish beer (“Piwo”) but I have to say that in general, Polish beer is EXCELLENT, and I can truthfully say I now enjoy it more than German or Czech beers (I am a true Pilsner Evangelist, who until moving to Krakow would have been scandalized had someone dare suggest that one day I would routinely turn my nose up at a Krombacher or a Staropramen) but I know that in the USA Poland if anything is known for wodka, and most people couldn’t even name more than 2 Polish brands of that, more than likely Chopin or Sobieski.
Many more years ago than I care to think about, I knew some people in the wine industry. One of the wineries, Bargetto, made some nice fruit wines - direct from the fruit. One time, never repeated, they had a strawberry wine that was amazing. The winemaker told me ‘never again’, it was too hard to do.
They still make some very nice fruit wines that I recommend. They also have a very nice mead.
Grains, such as rice and corn, are annual plants. Their whole reason for existing is to produce seeds as nutritious as possible, in order to pass on their genes to the next generation of corn or rice plants.