The tread title pretty much sums up the question. Why did grapes become the defacto wine making fruit? Obviously you can make wine from a wide variety of sugar containing plant material. I’ve got an uncle that makes a very nice if rather unsophisticated sipper from tart cherries. It’s not fancy but it’s good for what ails you. (Assuming you’re tired of walking a straight line or feeling your own face.)
The best answer I’ve ever heard basically says that Europe makes wine from grapes because that’s what the ancient Greeks and Romans did. They used grapes because they grew well on land that wasn’t good for much else (rocky hillsides). Is there any truth behind that or is the full answer more nuanced?
kanicbird’s mention of producing a wine that will keep may be telling. How long could ancient peoples with ancient production and storage methods have stored hard cider without it turning to vinegar? Most wine will eventually turn but the tannin from grapes do retard this process I believe (please correct me if I’m wrong.)
I guess it will turn eventually, but it’s pretty stable. I have in the garage some 15 month old cider that I helped a friend make. It sat around for a year before bottling, and was fine at that time. Manufactured from apples and yeast only, ABV by the crudest of estimates ~8%. I seem to recollect that the acid content of apples is quite high, and that helps to preserve the cider.
(For that matter, I also have in the garage a few bottles of ~10% beer I made back in 1998 - no preservatives used, and the last time I tried one a couple of years ago it was fine. High alcohol content helps, and some ciders naturally have that.)
You can press wine with your feet. Pressing apples requires slightly more advanced technology, which might not have been as readily available in the past.
Traditional cider* apples have a higher tannin content than general eating and cooking apples- they’re often basically inedible, especially fresh. Mouth puckering.
If cider’s kept sealed it shouldn’t turn into vinegar very fast at all, the bacteria which produce acetic acid do need oxygen. I’m pretty sure it could last until the next harvest is ready- I’ve made it myself, using no sterilising agents aside from in washing the bottle out, and it was fine a year later.
That said, there were loads of local superstitions about English traditional cider making, before people understood microbiology at all, so it presumably did go wrong often. My favourite is the practice of making a toad swim through the juice after pressing, which supposedly stopped the cider from going bad. Generally the same toad, incidentally; they’d keep a pet one in the orchard to make sure there was one to hand on pressing day.
The other occasional practice of adding a dead rat to the press, revolting though it is, makes more sense in retrospect, as a yeast nutrient additive.
*I’m English- cider is alcoholic to me; if it’s not, it’s apple juice.
Grapes have the highest sugar content of any fruit they were primarily used for wine because it got you fucked up. Apples have most of the same properties that grapes due in terms of tannins and nutrients they are just lacking sugar content. That means you’ve got to pick more to get the same level of drunk.
After apples the next level of fruit is so un sugary that they are rarely fermented on their own. For your uncles cherry wine I’m betting he sugared the hell out of it. Apple juice has about 50% more sugar than cherry. So you’re 5% abv cider would be about 3.5% abv cherry wine.
And many of today’s apples have been bred for higher sugar content, and are probably sweeter than what was available a hundred years ago. (Some of the older high-sugar apples are less productive, or more prone to insect/deer damage, or…) Basically, from apple juice you usually get beer (that is, cider) not wine.
Beer and cider were both pretty common in places where barley and apples grow. So I’m guessing that it’s partly that we don’t call it “wine” unless it has a higher alcohol content, and partly that people have fermented everything fermentable, depending on what grows where.
My Godmother used to make parsnip wine. It was pretty lethal, more akin to Vodka I think - no idea what the ABV was though but a couple of glasses knocked me right out.
Before Sheppy morphed into The Somerset Cider Experience Themepark, or whatever they call themselves these days, they used to be just a really visitor friendly cider maker; you could wander around the place and watch what they were doing with remarkable freedom. So I can tell you how they harvest apples - and I assume they are far from unique. There are orchards on site, and they just wait for the apples to drop off the tree, and then gather them up with one of those golf ball collecting buggies that you see on golf driving ranges. OK, so they didn’t have the buggies a hundred years ago, but I assume the harvesting process then was nothing more difficult than scooping them off the ground.
Sheppy’s website, if you’re interested. Annoyingly, cookies seem to be unavoidable. The cider, however, is excellent.
If it were akin to vodka, it would have been distilled, and you wouldn’t really be drinking it by the glass. A wine will typically have an ABV of 10-12%, and if you made it extra strong without fortifying, maybe 15-17% or so without using a special yeast that is tolerant to higher levels of alcohol. A vodka is usually 40% ABV, for comparison.