mister_monster on Nostr: I make wine. The reason grapes are used is because they grow well in poor soil. You ...
I make wine.
The reason grapes are used is because they grow well in poor soil. You can make a lot of alcohol on land not as desirable for other agriculture using grapes. It's all about production capacity and profitability. Not all fruit, but most sweet fruit, is perfectly adequate for wine production, and IMO most of the time much better, but they're more labor and resource intensive than grapes. Plums, for example, are stonefruit, so a tree planted from seed takes a decade or three to begin bearing fruit. And stone fruit will not give you identical fruit to the parent from seed, so consistency is nonexistent, which is why all commercial stonefruit production is done with cuttings grafted onto rootstock.
Distilled spirit would have nothing to do with the source for the alcohol, it's distilled. All distilled spirit will be a result of the volatiles produced by the yeast and have nothing to do with the source of the sugars, except in that a fruit might have different amounts of sucrose, fructose that yeast will metabolize differently depending on the variety of yeast. How it's treated after distillation determines flavor, such as aging in wood, peat, addition of sugars and other things. You can make vodka from pineapples.
The reason grapes are used is because they grow well in poor soil. You can make a lot of alcohol on land not as desirable for other agriculture using grapes. It's all about production capacity and profitability. Not all fruit, but most sweet fruit, is perfectly adequate for wine production, and IMO most of the time much better, but they're more labor and resource intensive than grapes. Plums, for example, are stonefruit, so a tree planted from seed takes a decade or three to begin bearing fruit. And stone fruit will not give you identical fruit to the parent from seed, so consistency is nonexistent, which is why all commercial stonefruit production is done with cuttings grafted onto rootstock.
Distilled spirit would have nothing to do with the source for the alcohol, it's distilled. All distilled spirit will be a result of the volatiles produced by the yeast and have nothing to do with the source of the sugars, except in that a fruit might have different amounts of sucrose, fructose that yeast will metabolize differently depending on the variety of yeast. How it's treated after distillation determines flavor, such as aging in wood, peat, addition of sugars and other things. You can make vodka from pineapples.