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Fruit Wine & Country Wine
Fruit Wine & Country Wine
Fruit wines or Country Wines are fermented alcoholic beverages made from a variety of ingredients other than grapes (the base of "ordinary" wine) and having a variety of flavours. Fruit wines or Country Wines are always called something wines (e.g., plum wine), since the word wine alone is often legally defined as a beverage made only from grapes. Fruit wine can be made from any sufficiently sweet fruit or, with addition of sugar or honey, from other fruits and many plant sources which are not fruits. The term Country wine is more commonly utilised in Great Britain for Fruit wines or Country Wines. In France and Germany, "vin du pays", or "Landwein" refers to relatively inexpensive kinds of standard grape wine.
Few foods other than grapes have the balanced quantities of sugar, acid, tannin and water to produce a stable, drinkable wine, so most country wines are adjusted in one or more respects. Enough natural sugar is needed to support a satisfactory fermentation and provide bacteriological stability through sufficient ethanol content, so the winemaker adds table sugar (sucrose) or sweet sap tapped from trees such as maple, birch, or palm; or honey. If a food is too tart, sugar and water may both be added to dilute the acidity, or additional tannin or acid may be required to round out the taste. These are added as chemicals or by adding a balancing fruit like crabapples, raisins or dates to an unbalanced base.
The fermentation of Fruit wines or Country Wines at home was particularly fashionable in the UK in the 1970s and was popularised in the BBC TV series The Good Life.
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