Isn't "fruit" wine kind of a marketing term for "fruit flavored wine", that is "strawberry wine" is supposed to taste like a treat?
The one alcohol that I've made in large quantities [1] is apple cider [2] which I've always made very dry, even though I perceive it has an apple taste, pear cider tastes like pears, even if it is dry.
In sinosphere adaptations of classical Chinese stories like Romance of the Three Kingdoms people talk about drinking 'wine' but my understanding is that what they drank wasn't made from grapes.
[1] probably drank too much of it one December and might have started to get dependent
[2] on my farm we have a few hedgerows that have apples that are good for eating, seedling apples (in some areas surrounded by hedgerows) are usually yucky for eating, although horses think they are fine and they are great for cider.
For fruit wines: you can ferment any fruit with enough sugar. They tend to be made sweet, as many fruits can have bitter or unpleasant flavors that come out when dry, such as strawberry. That said, one of my favorites was a dry raspberry that my dad made.
The Chinese stories could be referring to rice wine, a spirit similar to sake. If the stories refer to regions along the Silk road though, they could easily also be referring to grape wine.
is what would be a rice wine. Wikipedia listed it going back as far as 1000 BCE.
It is considered more of a wine than an ale presumably due to the alcohol content, the type of yeast used and how it is usually consumed, despite being a grain beverage (somewhat like barleywine only more so).
> Isn't "fruit" wine kind of a marketing term for "fruit flavored wine", that is "strawberry wine" is supposed to taste like a treat?
It shouldn't be, I'm sure there are companies who will sell that as "fruit wine" just as you'll get companies selling industrial alcohol mixed with grape juice as "wine" anywhere where that's legal, but a true fruit wine is made by fermenting that fruit.
It's for the same reason you feel dead after eating a pound of sugar, and compounded with extra dehydration. Take it from a former professional alcoholic, drink your water and take your B vitamins.
Barleywine is a beer (it requires malting of the barley) marketed as a wine.
Sorghum wine (baijiu) is a distilled spirit, closer to vodka, mistranslated as a wine.
Rice wine (sake, mijiu) really does seem more like a wine than a beer, apart from the fact that it's made from grain. Not sure what is special about rice that makes it suitable for making wine.
